Marco Laimre

1968– · Estonian artist (born 1968)
Eesti Kaasaegse Kunsti Muuseum; Eesti Kunstimuuseum

Marco Laimre (1968; Marko Laimre before 2004) is an artist whose work includes photography, installation, sculpture, painting, performance sound art, intervention, curation and text. Laimre’s work is not stylistically coherent, nor does he have a signature style; his artistic output is concept not media based. In his art, Laimre looks at common everyday phenomena, approaching them from the perspective of the humanities. Marco Laimre studied painting in the early 1990s at the Estonian Academy of Art and entered the art scene as an anarchist, an uncompromising and critical artist. His early work has been categorised as part of the aggressive self-assertion practices of the generation that began its artistic path in the 1990s, expressed in the post-socialist context as institutional critique and New Left rhetoric in art. For example, in 1994 Laimre opened a marble memorial plaque at the lobby of the Estonian Academy of Arts stating: “The department of cave painting was founded here on 23.X.1994”. Many of his early works focus on the local political and cultural context and analyse the self-mythologisation and the discourse of freedom in the newly independent republic (“Shared territories”, 1995; “§ 45”, 1998, etc.). For example, his “Red arrow” (1996) is an interactive installation made of a quern-stone and speakers. When the quern-stone is turned in the direction the arrow indicates, a distorted version of the Estonian national anthem starts playing at the speed of which the stone is turned. The work was created for the Annual Exhibition of the Soros Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia titled “Estonia as a sign” as an ironic comment on national self-mythologising. Laimre’s early work clearly presents pieces that centre on “me” (“Me and art”, 1994; “Me and the constitution”, 1996; “Me and optimism”, 1996; “Me and theatre”, 1996, etc.) that defined the artist’s relationship to the world and explored structures of power and the symbolic order. His work often blends autobiographical and social elements in a polemical way, which results in the praise of individuality (“My world maps I–III”, 1997–2001) or presenting a common phenomenon as something personal (“Manifest Labjekti kohta”, 2000). The work “Sugarfree” (1996) is based on the artist’s personal experience in a psychiatric clinic and draws attention to isolation as a mechanism of institutional violence. Performances “Bonj-njonj-nonj-non-now” (1999) and “L’ile mysterieuse” (2000) refer to artists’ fate and role in society in a bodily and masochist manner, pointing to the continuous need to disregard no

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue