Curator´s tour at the exhibition “Sooster 100: View from Private Collections”
The curator´s tour introduces the life and work of a uniquely playful artist and one of the most important innovators of Estonian post-war modernism, Ülo Sooster (1924–1970). It will cover his creative development in early experiments on the island of Hiiumaa and his studies in Tartu, as well as his artistic choices in the masterworks of his heyday in Moscow and the mysterious unfinished compositions of his final years.
The exhibition Sooster 100: View from Private Collections features nearly 160 works by the artist, many of which will be on display for the first time. An important part of the exhibition is the Sooster family collection, which, thanks to the decision of the artist’s relatives, arrived in Tartu from Moscow in 1990, thus shifting the focus of research on Sooster’s work to Estonia. The view of Sooster’s oeuvre from the private collections enriches the artist’s image with previously unseen rarities, and confirms Sooster’s reputation during the Soviet era as a cultivator of radical cosmo-eroticism and the creator of a distinctive self-mythology based on the leitmotifs of the juniper, fish and egg.
