BIOGRAPHY - Andreas Trossek. Merike Estna

Merike Estna is a painter who started working in Tallinn in the first decade of the 21st century and moved on to London towards the end of the decade. Her rather numerous and visually distinctive work has echoes of experimenting with how possible it is to be an independent artist in a neoliberal, economically and politically “unified” Europe.

Estna has tried quite a range of styles in painting (ranging from realism to neo-expressionism), but her figurative vocabulary has always remained loyal to one recognizable principle: she always uses a human figure or even a group of figures in the foreground, and most often the figures are depicted in provocative poses or at least with confronting expressions. However, the backgrounds in her paintings and collages have been rather neutral and confined to calm blue skies that are enlivened by a cloud or two or at the very most a fighter plane. Her topics include war and peace, war and sex, sex and the city etc. Everyone can surely grasp her pictures in a moment, but whether these paintings cause them a blindly affirmative mania of consumption or an allergic defence mechanism against it depends on the person. Since the beginning of the 2000’s, Estna has worked with the neoliberal world of consumption in its broadest sense. She uses smiling ad faces that inspire ideals, but also pornography that ignites desire as well as the numbing idiocy of the multiplex cinema and mall culture, reducing all values to their lowest possible common denominator (i.e. money). But defining her works as Neo-Pop would simply be a lousy statement of the fact that the thematic reservoir opened up by British and American Pop artists after the world wars has proved to be an inexhaustible pool of possibilities even in the globalized world of the capitalism of the new millennium.

Firstly, the classification “Neo-Pop” could only really be used for those works that the artist finished during or directly after her bachelor and master degree studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Paintings, collages and videos completed between 2003 and 2008 do carry this certain recognizable “mutagen” of Pop Art that was synthesized by the protagonists and pioneers of the post-war baby boomer generation. Let's take Richard Hamilton and, for example, the influence of his work “Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?” (1956) can be seen in almost all of Estna's collages, as they too show half-naked human bodies in commercial poses. It would also not be an overstatement to claim that David Hockney’s “A Bigger Splash” (1967) with its idiotic and genuinely Pop-Art title and dominating blue sky has inspired all those paintings and collages where Estna uses a blue background for staging dreamlike and seemingly pointless events. The realistic forms of Pop Art that emphasized modernity have also infiltrated into Estna's vocabulary of forms, and therefore, it is possible to say in retrospect that for Estna the years 2003–2008 were a period of realism that was in a sense Neo-Pop-like, at times provocative and at times also dream-like. Definitely worthy of mention from the period are her solo exhibitions “Jüri and Mari’s adventures” (2004) at Vaal Gallery, “Rabbit: Oh, pretty boys everywhere!” (2005) at Hobusepea Gallery, “God’s zoo is diverse aka WAR and PEACE” (2006, collaboration with Maksim Surin) at Hobusepea Gallery, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is the fairest of us all?” (2007) at Draakon Gallery and “Plain as Pikestaff” (2007) at Haapsalu City Gallery.

Secondly, it would be difficult not to notice that Estna’s work has changed a lot since her studies at Goldsmiths College in London. Since 2009 we can talk of a new intermediate period in her work – compared to her earlier creations the works of this period are picturesque, pastulous, striving for richer colours and abstractions, so it can be said that she is focusing more on technique. The principle of differentiating between the background and the foreground figure that characterized Estna’s earlier figurative vocabulary is now gone and the back and foreground have often been confused. However, this inclination towards abstraction had quietly started to creep into Estna’s paintings much earlier – in the form of an expressive cloud pattern in “Northern land – My Homeland” (2006) and the watercolour-like blue sky in “Kiss My Ass” (2007). But the psychedelic layer of colour painted over Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh kissing in “Melodrama” (2009) and over similar views of London clearly shows that Estna’s interests have shifted towards formal plays from a defined vocabulary of forms and staged scenarios. The most important signal of a stylistic change was definitely her spatial installation “Nudes and landscapes” (2010) at Kumu Art Museum, where one of the exhibition areas of the museum was completely covered in abstract “porn wallpaper” designed by Estna as well as pastulous large nudes and landscape paintings. The visitor on entering the room saw among other things a stormy sea and “women athletes” opening their legs and taking in Zeus's “golden shower” like Danae. However, all this was shown using moderate abstractions. The solo exhibition “Voyeur” in 2011 at Hobusepea Gallery was almost completely based on picturesque abstractions; as a matter of fact, the underlying theme of the exhibition was a game of hide-and-seek, where the visitor had to find human figures in abstract paintings. All those figures were either kissing or doing something else that if depicted clearly would also be called pornography. Estna spent the summer of 2010 in a residency in Loviisa where she created a series called “Holiday” that is also inspired by pornography. Technique-wise the influence of Cecily Brown, one of Estna's personal favourites, is evident.

Hence, quite a few works by Estna point to pornography, but the artist has not taken a moralizing feminist or condemning position, rather she has kept to the ambivalent provocation that, thanks to the lessons learned from Pop Art, was characteristic of her earlier works. The centuries long history of painting makes this approach easy – art history is full of scenes of mythology or allegory, nudes and landscapes, taut Venuses and divinities with pumped muscles. There would be more than enough references, if she ever needed them. Yet it seems that Estna would not even require such an apology drawn from art history – during the past decade she has been recurrently dealing with the symbolic mapping of current values: bimbos and yuppies, blue skies and fake facial expressions, cool fighter planes, cute animals etc. In short, she deals with everything that makes today's homes so pleasant, so appealing. Ideals and taboos, when looked at closely, seem to be the two sides of the same coin anyway.

Andreas Trossek