Marco Laimre. Motor
Curators: Indrek Köster and Taavi Talve (Johnson and Johnson)
From 16 December, Marco Laimre’s solo exhibition MOTOR will be open in Tallinn Art Hall, bringing together contemporary art and motocross, garage and landscape, sport and technology. With this exhibition this motorsport-loving artist tries to rationalise his passion and find a practical reason for riding a motorcycle instead of simply doing it.
You are welcome to the opening of the exhibition on Friday, 15 December at 6 pm. The exhibition will remain open until 28 January.
The artist poses several questions in his exhibition: How can we combine the process of art with motorsport? How can we create a symbol of landscape from the perspective of a motorcyclist? What happens when ‘garage poetics’ is transferred to the context of an art exhibition, or vice versa? How is repairing things different from creating as a process? Does an engine have a face?
According to the curators, the exhibition provides a glimpse into Laimre’s experience of garage culture, analysing that world of constantly making and inventing and the connecting points between hobby sports and a personal art practice.
The exhibition displays Laimre’s most recent series of photographs, installations, audio and video pieces which one way or another deal with his relationship to the motorcycle and garage culture.
Siim Preiman, the curator of the Tallinn Art Hall, believes that in this exhibition Laimre has managed to bring together his greatest passions, sport and art, with enticing simplicity enabling the viewers to see things in a completely different light. “Although many people would immediately see these two worlds as different, they do have a number of similarities. Sport includes both bodybuilding and chess, while art encompasses figurative sculpture and conceptualism simultaneously: phenomena from completely different fields may sometimes be more similar to one another than the furthest extremes within the same world.”
The marks from Marco Laimre accelerating and braking are indisputable in the history of Estonian art. ‘Innovative’, ‘unbounded’ and ‘fresh’ are adjectives that describe every one of Laimre’s undertakings. This large solo exhibition of Laimre’s work brings to a close the ‘sport art’ project that he started in 2015 with the exhibition “Nurrr” at Hobusepea Gallery. In the context of the exhibition, the artist immerses himself in the hobby-world of motocross and observes it as an agent from the inside.
We would like to thank: Estonian Cultural Endowment, Estonian Ministry of Culture, Department of Culture, Veinisõber, Photography Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts, Maris Karjatse, Anna Kaarma, Reimo Võsa-Tangsoo, Raul Keller.
