Mihkel Ilus and Paul Kuimet. Endless Story

The duo exhibition of Mihkel Ilus and Paul Kuimet, “Endless Story” will be opened in Tallinn Art Hall on 7 March, bringing together two artists whose work is united by their dedication to the material and their creative intensity, which is most clearly expressed in their fascination with their chosen media and techniques. Together they look at the invisible systems that drive our world, which despite the passing of time, remain or are reborn in an almost unchanged form. The curator of the exhibition is Siim Preiman.

The exhibition will open to the public on 7 March at 12pm. Opening speeches and a tour with the curator and artists will start at 2pm. The exhibition will remain open until 31 May 2020.

Both painting and photography endow their practitioners with numerous guidelines for the correct ways of behaviour and choice of material. For the painter, let the canvas be linen and the paint be oil. Analogue photographs are not to be retouched in Photoshop, but by skilful manipulation of light in the darkroom. And so, we mainly see traditional materials used in the art of painting in Ilus’ works: oil paint, linen canvas and untreated wood. Kuimet, from his side, consistently applies traditional forms of photography: slides, film and analogue enlargements.

This exhibition is significant for the two artists, because they both operate in territories new to them. Kuimet, who has for many years captured modernist architecture, shows us how London’s Crystal Palace, built in the 1850s, became an archetype of the official architecture of global capitalism through copying and distortion. After many years of playful deconstruction of painting, Mihkel Ilus has reached the point where he can use his developed visual language to also tell stories outside the world of painting. Displaying human-sized men-easels in different situations, he makes a reference to the political and work culture in Estonia.