so Soft/ + Pure
textile paint, robe 120x50cm 2014
Merike Estna’s solo show “Corporate Jungle” and Temnikova & Kasela gallery’s 5th birthday
Temnikova & Kasela is pleased to invite you to the opening of Merike Estna’s solo show “Corporate Jungle” on Friday the 4th of September 2015 at 8pm when the gallery will also celebrate its 5th birthday.
Taking its name from the title of a sticker series from an online messenger service Sticker Store, the exhibition sets out to juxtapose what has become a familiar mode of digital image-based communication with the artist’s ongoing exploration of painting as a practice. On view will be a new painting series “Slip Off” and an installation entitled “I’m a bit out of sync but next time I’ll do better, I promise” originally conceived for Cesis Art Festival in Latvia.
The latter consists of a painting as a stage covering much of the gallery’s floor surface, accompanied by a sound piece and posters distributed across gallery walls and the city. Employing the brush stroke technique developed in her past few shows — as if to locate the bottom line of painter-as-colour-mixologist, an almost domestic act of repetitive work linking painting to craft — Estna’s floor-as-painting is a testament to skills acquired through both home work like mopping and artistic work of a painter.
Meanwhile, the posters express the thoughts occupying the artist during these activities. She ponders the idea of a surface as a means of communication; the physical surfaces of clothing, interior design, technology or liquids; music as a surface that can be ordered or mixed.
The paintings placed amidst the installation are a mix of ready-made digital imagery designed to encapsulate the complexity and, simultaneously, the standardised nature of language into non-verbal signs. Transferring this idea into the realm of art, Estna’s paintings pull between the abstract and the overly representational; In a way, leading the exhibition to close in the loop, bouncing between the various surfaces on show.
Merike Estna is an artist working in London. Her upcoming projects include a solo exhibitions, installations and performances in various galleries including Palermo Galerie, Stuttgart, Germany; Poetry and Pattern, X Marks the Bokship, Matt’s Gallery, London, UK; House of Saint Barnabas, London, UK; and a group show at Blyth Gallery, Imperial College, London.
The exhibition will remain open untill Saturday, 31st of October 2015.
Lastekodu 1, 10115 Tallinn, Estonia
www.temnikova.ee
