Mari Kurismaa  

View 1, 2

1975

Kurismaa painted this pair of works as a fresh student of interior architecture at the State Art Institute (ERKI). She had become more seriously interested in art and artmaking during her years at Tallinn Art High School, where the teachers included Ludmilla Siim and Mari Roosvalt and where she first started to dream of becoming an artist. The picture field is divided into sectors: a heavy curtain with a pattern borrowed from her grandmother’s dress; behind it a view to greenery, painted after a vine branch in a vase; cheerful zebra patterns for the nursery… We can see the youthful desire to accommodate several states of mind and also knowledge acquired from painting and design in a single picture. Yet the main pattern remains the same.