FAMOUS ARTISTMari Kurismaa
Mari Kurismaa is an Estonian artist working at the intersection of painting, installation, sculpture, and design. She occupies a special place on the Estonian art scene as a master of geometric abstraction and minimalist spatial objects. Kurismaa’s art is a sustained and fascinating investigation of the fundamental categories of visual art — form, space, rhythm, colour, and light — expressed through clean lines, flat areas of colour, impeccable proportions, and elegant simplicity.
Her works possess an architectural rigour and at the same time a poetic lightness — they seem to hover between two and three dimensions, between painting and sculpture, between art and design. Kurismaa recognises no rigid boundaries between disciplines and moves freely from one to another, creating objects that simultaneously function as paintings, sculptures, and architectural models. She is an active participant in international exhibitions and one of the key figures in contemporary Estonian art.
Mari Kurismaa was one of the first Estonian artists to work in the genre of spatial installation as early as the 1980s, when this format was virtually unknown in Estonia and was met with bewilderment by the public. She literally anticipated her time by a decade, creating objects and environments that viewers — and indeed many fellow artists — only learned to understand, appreciate, and engage with considerably later, once installation had become an established language of contemporary art.