Kristi Kongi

Kristi Kongi (born in 1985, in Tallinn) is 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.

See also Kristi Kongi on artists database of CCA (Estonian Centre for Contemporary Art)