On Friday, 11 April at 5 p.m., Meiu Münt will open her solo exhibition “Desmurgia” in the monumental gallery of the Tartu Art House.
The exhibition includes a selection of the artist’s oil paintings, mainly from the years 2020 – 2025. This period has been a wounded time. A cruel and oppressive time.
Meiu Münt writes:
And spring will still come.
And every spring, a goldfinch or a blackbird, I really don’t know which, sings in the courtyard of the Art House.
And children’s shouts and playful voices can be heard rising from kindergartens in every season.
In early summer last year, a ferret with three kits ran across the Art House yard. They stopped next to the garage, the kits strolled around the yard a bit, and then they slipped under the fence and into the kindergarten yard. Later, while waiting for the bus at the Pepler bus stop, I heard the alarming, frightened sounds of birds and saw the white-masked face of a ferret peering around the corner of a dormitory….
Clouds go their own way: each view of the sky reveals a different picture. I don’t know how to paint clouds in a way I like. I’ve tried… The clouds I paint are heavy, clumsy, oppressive and the wrong colour: they have no air and crash to the ground…. There’s a trick to painting clouds, but I haven’t yet found it. And should I? Let them be tin-grey, or blood-red, heavy lame clouds, roaring down raining.
It’s the little things, the moments, the sounds, the smells, the strange encounters, the play of colours, the light and the shadows: it’s that desmurgia, or just a little patch to help you heal, something really small but effective, to keep you going and to keep yourself together at difficult times.
It’s good to have someone to help, to blow on the wounds and to dress them sometimes, but you can’t rely on someone else. No one binds and heals better than yourself, and then you have to side step, double down, create your own mental benevolent Doppelgänger, above all anoint and preserve yourself, and find something in each day that holds and cares.
The artist’s creative work has been supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the Estonian Artists’ Association and the Renate Jõesaare Scholarship of the Estonian National Culture Foundation (2023).
The exhibition will be open until 11 May.
Additional information: Maret Tamme, Producer of the Tartu Art House, produtsent@kunstimaja.ee, 5800 3882