Urmas Ploomipuu’s White House
Location: 4th floor, Cabinet of Prints and Drawings
“Urmas Ploomipuu is known primarily for his prints and for his designs for the one- and two-kroon notes, which used to be in circulation in Estonia. However, in Estonian painting in the 1980s, his oil paintings rose to the fore because of their well-considered construction, technical craftsmanship and realistic portrayal, defining significant differences with his contemporaries,” said Tõnis Saadoja, the exhibition’s curator and book’s author.
The majority of the artist’s known works are collected in the richly illustrated book with Estonian- and English-language texts that accompanies the exhibition, thereby revealing the nature of Ploomipuu’s creative method. Indrek Sirkel is the designer of the book and the exhibition.
Urmas Ploomipuu (1942–1990) worked primarily as a printmaker, while also being one of the chicest representatives of the pop wave of the 1970s. Ploomipuu’s solo exhibition includes his prints and his few painted works – including four oil paintings, and a few gouaches and watercolours – which have not received much attention to date.
Urmas Ploomipuu’s White House is the third retrospective exhibition of the artist’s work in the last nineteen years. He never had a solo exhibition during his lifetime. While the quality of his relatively small number of works has guaranteed passing references in the critiques of 1970s printmaking and 1980s painting, as well as a place in subsequent survey exhibitions, his complete works have not been summarized to date.
The 1980s was a baroque period in Estonian painting – rich and abundant – but did not involve mental work outside of the technique of painting itself for many artists. Thick paint was used, and the paintings were multi-layered, polychromatic, large in scale and numerous. However, none of this is evident in Ploomipuu’s legacy. In addition to their uniqueness in local hyperrealism – where the artist can more narrowly be categorised – his mathematically extremely precise and geometrically organised still lifes can be viewed as elegant entries under the very narrow heading of local conceptual painting.
Having stood apart from larger communities during his creative period, the artist tends to be seen as marginal compared to the mainstream of the 70s and 80s but, as a result, is even more significant. Upon closer scrutiny, Ploomipuu’s work, which seems to be traditional art of his period upon brief examination, actually differs from the background system of the day in several significant ways, and is a unique phenomenon in Estonian art history.
Curator: Tõnis Saadoja
Sponsor:
Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
