Sirja-Liisa Eelma

1973– · Estonian artist (born 1973)
Eesti Kunstimuuseum; Temnikova & Kasela

Sirja-Liisa Eelma (1973) is a conceptual painter, whose visual language is characterised by minimalist structures. She often works with repeating and slowly changing images in order to analyse themes like lack of intimacy, the physical experience of pause, silence, and delineating the visible and the invisible. Eelma’s practice relies on the mutual impact of the time factor and the spatial context in painting, her works evoke contemplation and meditative quietness. Eelma’s colours are extremely nuanced, sensitive in gradation and mostly pastel. She started her career as an artist in the second half of the 1990s. In her early years, Eelma focused on the playful juxtaposition of letters and shapes. At the show “Õ><Ö” (2006, Tallinn City Gallery) she displayed a series that offered proof of a theorem regarding the alikeness of the letters Õ and Ö; the exhibition “Everyday vocabulary” (2006, Hobusepea Gallery) combined elements of different sign systems to create a new coherence. Since the late 2000s she has increasingly focused on the process of painting, letting herself be guided by the flow of time, the pleasure and solitude of painting a repeating image. The exhibition and the series of paintings titled “Secret Matter” (2003, Hobusepea Gallery) centred on the hidden or perceptible objects as well as expectations and fears related to their environment. Eelma continued working with these ideas in the show “There is Nothing” (2012, Draakon Gallery), where all the exhibited paintings depicted curtains. The anxious repetition of the image of curtains expressed a tension, whereas the title of the show evoked a safe environment. Repetitive motifs were also the central element in the exhibition “The Waiting Room” (2014, Hobusepea Gallery), where the artist showed similar views of interiors and, drawing parallels between the similarity of the gallery space and the depicted waiting room, created an installation of a-space-within-a-space. The series of paintings “Emptying Field of Meaning” (2014) was the first time a slowly changing symmetrical repetition of an abstract geometrical shape appeared in Eelma’s work. The idea of the series was to create a pause in the contemporary information overload, above all, for the painter herself but also for the viewer.

Browse 42 works in the catalogue →

Contemporaries in Temnikova & Kasela: Eetu Sihvonen · Man Yau · Dafna Maimon · Lieven Lahaye · Sevina Tzanou

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue