Solo exhibition by painter and installation artist Kristi Kongi opens
On 14 May painter Kristi Kongi’s solo exhibition “Shimmering star Magenta. Was it a dream or was it real?” opens at Kogo contemporary art gallery at the Tartu Widget Factory. The exhibition speaks of unfolding, awareness of place and recollection where colours have a central role.
Kristi Kongi writes, “When I think of colours and where they come from, they are usually connected with specific places. I have usually experienced these places on my way to or from somewhere.
During the last few years, as I travel around, I have written down the names of colours. I have discovered that by describing these places in this way, according to colours, my recollection of the experience is more precise and truer.
The exhibition “Shimmering star Magenta. Was it a dream or was it real?” includes oil paintings on canvas and a painting installation that extends into the gallery space. The oil paintings were completed between spring 2020 and spring 2021. The exhibition is open from 14 May to 19 June 2021.
Kristi Kongi is represented by Kogo Gallery and has participated in two previous exhibitions at the gallery – in 2018 “Secret Whistle in the Forest” with Mari-Leen Kiipli and in 2020 the group exhibition “Time to Dream or Fear?”. This exhibition is Kristi Kongi’s first solo show at Kogo Gallery.
“Shimmering star Magenta. Was it a dream or was it real?” is the second exhibition in the gallery’s program this year – “Ecology–Economy” – which addresses various sensitive issues in ecology and the economy.
The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the City of Tartu and Akzo Nobel
Thanks to: Angeliina Liivlaid, Maria Hommik, Urmo Teekivi, Elena Past, Argo Otsma, Tanel Paliale, Ahti Lill, Eike Eplik.
Kristi Kongi (born in 1985) is a painter and installation artist whose work focuses on colour, light, and space. Her bright coloured paintings often take the form of impressive installations created for specific settings. Besides painting on canvas, plywood, walls, floors and ceiling, she also uses various cloured materials like fabrics, plexiglass to create her painting installations.
Specific places that the artist has visited or inhabited and her observations, emotions and memories are often the base of her paintings and installations. She likes to create space-in-space situations by transferring those memory-places to the exhibition space by self-invented transformations-systems. The latter arises from the painting experiments where Kristi tests different questions related to colour, light and shadow. Kristi has named those experiments “Exercises With the Moon” – an example of a poetic name, a kind of her paintings and installations often bear.
Kristi Kongi studied painting at Tartu Art College (BA, 2004-2008) and graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts painting department (MA, 2008-2011). She has been awarded Young Artist Prize (2011), Sadolin Art Prize (2013), Konrad Mägi Prize (2017) and nominated for the Köler Prize (2016). She is an associate professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts painting department.