PRESS RELEASE

 ANDRES KOORT (1969) will open his personal exhibition By the Way in Draakon gallery at 5pm on Monday, August 28, 2017. Exhibition will be open until September 16, 2017.

Andres Koort has obtained a degree in stage design at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 1993 and has additionally studied painting at the Academy of Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands, in 1991. Koort has participated in exhibitions as a painter, scenographer, designer and curator since 1991. He is a member of the Estonian Artists' Association and Estonian Painters' Union. His works can be found in private collections as well as in the collections of Tartu Art Museum and Lithuanian Art Museum.

It is difficult to classify Andres Koort's artwork within the frames of traditional art movements. The artist uses recognisable images so that his landscapes seem realistic to certain extent while not following the elementary rules of perspective in his spatial treatment nor creating the effect of light and shadow. Perspective and shadows determine the moment and the place – lack of the abovementioned elements may refer to the artist's wish to depict reality in general, independent of time and space. Andres Koort has developed a specific personal painting technique while for many years having been inspired by Chinese and Japanese traditional landscape painting. Koort rather studies the ways of thinking and visual form of Japanese and Chinese art instead of following their centuries-long traditional rules and techniques. The artist applies several layers of paintings on top of each other instead of transparent layers of paint, thus creating abstract landscapes with faint boundaries, reminding of mirages. In his newest work, Koort continues experimenting with various painting techniques.
Estonian philosopher Margus Ott writes about the present exhibition as follows: “Motion belongs to matter; matter is motion. The paths on which movement takes place show the character of materials; the character of materials open up the paths. Matter is articulated, with its veins. Matter has paths and the paths congeal into matter. The paths are temporal, moving along these paths creates time, and time always provides paths. Path maker is also the one creating time. Everything is still in the beginning, the times, the paths and those making and creating are starting to diverge.”

Exhibitions in Draakon gallery are supported by Estonian Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.