Raoul Kurvitz
Location: 5th floor, Gallery of Contemporary Art
As of Friday, 18 January Raoul Kurvitz’s large-scale solo exhibition will be open in the Contemporary Art Gallery and courtyard of the Kumu Art Museum. The exhibition includes installations, performances, paintings and objects from the late 1980s to the present day. The exhibition also provides a sampling of Kurvitz’s videos and musical compositions.
“Raoul Kurvitz works in different media, and the range of subjects that interest him is wide, extending from philosophy to pop culture,” said Kati Ilves, the curator of the exhibition. “The exhibition presents the artist’s most notable works, many of which are now classics of Estonian contemporary art. The exhibition includes both new works and old objects that have been re-created for the exhibition.”
The Kumu courtyard is the location for More about Trains, a 12-metre-high installation that has been completed especially for this exhibition. Kurvitz’s re-created work Maelstrom is comprised of almost 10,000 bottles. On exhibit is also a giant mural made of nettles from the series Youth and Middle Age of the East European Plain. “Kurvitz’s work is large in scale. His installations reach toward the heights and are remarkable for the volume of materials,” said Kati Ilves.
Darkness, Darkness, a music video by Kurvitz, who has recently devoted a lot of time to music, is also included in the exhibition.
Raoul Kurvitz (born 1961) started his creative work after graduating from the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR (currently the Estonian Academy of Arts) in 1984, with a degree in architecture. In 1986, along with his classmate Urmas Muru, Kurvitz formed the Rühm T group. They were soon joined by the architect Peeter Pere and several other artists and creative people. Rühm T called their paintings Cold Expressionism, which lacked passion and were distanced, but were still interventionist. Criticism at that time primarily linked Rühm T’s activities with the concepts of Postmodernism, the Transavantgarde and “expressionist decadence.” The exhibition includes several documentations of Kurvitz’s and Rühm T’s performances: I Am from Timbuktu (1988), When Lord Zarathustra Was Young and Polite (1989), etc.
Curator: Kati Ilves
We thank:
The Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Railways, Kadriorg Restaurant, Andres Lepp, Ain Talalaev, Joosep Tormis, Risto Rõõmus, Tallinn Light Festival
