Urmas Lüüs

Estonian artist (born 1987)
Eesti Kunstimuuseum; Tütar galerii

trained at Estonian Academy of Arts

“Urmas Lüüs is an Estonian artist working in the fields of jewellery, sculpture, installation, writing, music and theatre.” That’s the short explanation on the artist’s website. Embroidery, video and photography can be added to the list of permanent media with which he is familiar. Lüüs’s diverse artistic practice is based on a material mystery physically embedded in everyday objects, often beginning with an obsessive process of accumulation. For example, his last solo exhibition at the Tütar Gallery in 2023 was based on over 7,000 photographs taken in cemeteries. The exhibition As an artist on the theoretical horizon of neo-materialism, Lüüs inverts the most important principle of conceptualism, which states that “thought should be more intense than the force of its embodiment” . The credo of Lüüs is reflected in the belief that the artistic text is kept in operation by the energy of the personal poetic manipulation of the material. At the most general level, this implies a conscious opposition to the dominant patterns of behaviour of both the industrial production society and the service-based information society. The medium/genre dialogues that characterise Lüüs derive from the arsenal of practical craftsmanship of the applied artist. The system is based on the eloquence of a seemingly useless decorative gesture. As an artist, Lüüs has an uncanny enduring relationship with the aesthetic of saturated poverty. In his case, it ranges from the imagery of religious kitsch in Catholic cemeteries to dusty souvenir horns on the walls of hunting lodges; and from tasteless nature images made from amber shards to Richelieu embroidery. His relationship with these object worlds, picked up from the peripheries of our aesthetic focus, is anything but nostalgic-sentimental camp. It is characterised by the retroactive excitement of the lived-through, collected and piled-up material into grotesque images and witty stories.

Browse 79 works in the catalogue →

Also trained at Estonian Academy of Arts: Eduard Wiiralt · Evald Okas · Andrus Johani · Johann Naha · Jüri Arrak

Contemporaries in Tütar galerii: Johannes Luik · Kärt Hammer · Angela Maasalu · Liis Tedre · Siiri Jüris

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Data from MuIS and the EKM Digital Collection. Full catalogue