Exhibition > Past > Haus Gallery

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Haus Gallery 15.12.2022-27.01.2023

TRIBAL FOXES

Only nine large-format works from Urmas Viik's new graphic art collection create a compellingly mystical atmosphere in Haus Galeri's velvet-black exhibition hall. The strange figures of the artist's self-mythological tribal foxes on a white paper surface intertwine animal and man, who meet on the common existential ground created by a primitive but subtle intellectual feeling - in a space where emotions of colors are dictated by the rhythms that arise in the viewer themselves, which are attractively provoked by the poses, glances and inner tensions of the tribal foxes.

The artist himself has written the following about his characters: "The name of the series "Tribal foxes" is a mixture of two words - "tribal" and "werefoxes". The series plays with images as fun and irresponsibly as with concepts. Clan, tribe and gang features are mixed together. The mythical werefox, the great spirit of transformation, leaves his mark on the whole series of works, blurring the line between the exotic and the mundane, the archaic and the urban, and the sensual and the comic. The stylistics of the works are extremely sparse, limited to black, white and orange. Although both the graphics themselves and the process of their creation are fully digital, the style searches tend to swing towards the classical line culture, using only individual and hard-to-notice non-manual shifts. A careful look will of course also notice the influences of the comics both in terms of characters and graphic style, where the inherent narrative is left in the background to keep the main emphasis on the image details."

Urmas Viik established himself in the Estonian art scene already at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, being perceived as a strongly expressive graphic artist whose focus has been mainly on man and the various forms of his historical and contemporary manifestation. From his early work, we know Viik's large-format works made using the drypoint technique, where the author combined the signs of modern and primitive art language. A similar characteristic has accompanied his work more widely. In addition to recognizably intriguing free graphics that always invite deeper thinking, Urmas Viik's scope also includes conceptual comics creation, sculptural objects and installations, and significantly book graphics, for which Viik has been recognized both at the annual Estonian Most Beautiful Books competition, but also internationally, having been included in the IBBY in 2010 (International Board on Books for Young People) honorary list of illustrators.

 

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