On Friday, 6 March at 5:00 p.m., Ahti Seppet will open his solo exhibition “Free Will” in the large gallery of the Tartu Art House. The curator of the exhibition is Indrek Grigor.
The exhibition is divided into three conceptual sections that reveal tensions across different viewpoints in the artist’s practice: body and mind, desire and responsibility, and the personal and the political.
The series of landscape paintings “Heaven and Earth” draws on the artist’s youthful experiences by the sea and allows for a form of reflective nostalgia. In the motifs of sky and water, horizon and reflection, immediate bodily memory meets a philosophical generalisation of nature’s unity and its oppositions.
The series of sculptures and assemblages “The Call of Blood” plays with the political satire intrinsic in Seppet’s work, as grotesque as it is brutal. An ideological legacy transmitted “through blood” reaches deep into the mechanisms of power and submission within our seemingly democratic present.
The exhibition culminates in the quasi-religious composition “Free Will”, centred on sexuality, love and the body as carriers of both agency and vulnerability. The metaphorical constellation of brain, heart and sex organ embodies personal freedom, while erotics, ethics and self-censorship delineate its limits.
Free Will does not offer answers; it sustains tension: between body and mind, desire and responsibility, personal experience and a generalising gaze.
Ahti Seppet (b. 1953) graduated in 1973 from the Tartu Art School, specialising in artistic wood design. In 1978–79 he studied law at the University of Tartu while simultaneously participating in the activities of the Art Cabinet, led by Andrus Kasemaa. Seppet has worked at the Tartu Children’s Art School and, since 1984, at the Tartu Art Museum, initially as the head of the Anton Starkopf Studio Museum and later as a curator of the sculpture collection until 2014. He is a member of the Estonian Sculptors’ Association, as well as the Estonian Artists’ Association, the Tartu Artists’ Association and the artists’ group Para.
Seppet began exhibiting in the late 1970s with paintings, but gained wider recognition as a sculptor in the early 1980s. He has actively organised solo exhibitions and participated in group exhibitions with paintings, sculptures, jewellery and drawings in Estonia, Germany, Finland and elsewhere. Seppet has curated several sculpture exhibitions, including Pallas Sculpture (Tartu Art Museum, 2006) and Anton Starkopf. A Legend of Estonian Sculpture (Kumu Art Museum, 2010). Also notable in the history of sculpture is the series of small-scale sculpture exhibitions initiated by Seppet in 1987.
The exhibition is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.
The exhibition will be open until 5 April.
Additional information: Maret Tamme, Producer of the Tartu Art House, produtsent@kunstimaja.ee, 5800 3882