Kristi Kongi personal exhibition "Chromatic Drift"

Painter Kristi Kongi’s large-scale solo exhibition is one of the highlights of Kumu Art Museum’s anniversary year. It is the first solo exhibition by an Estonian female artist to be presented in Kumu’s Great Hall, featuring new works created specifically for this exhibition. The exhibition creates a holistic sensory and spatial experience, centered on Kongi’s signature element: color. Extending beyond the boundaries of the canvas, colors and motifs spill onto the floor, walls, windows, and even into the outdoor space.

Chromatic Drift reflects the artist’s inner journeys over the past few years, during which color has served as a means of mapping and preserving both emotional states and memories. Motifs of openings and passages recur throughout the works, speaking of a sensitive transition into another place, a parallel world. The staircase—both as an image and as a physical object—suggests either movement forward or remaining still. These empty landscapes created by Kongi are not about arrival but instead draw attention to the state of being in-between.

Architects Mari Hunt and Grete Daut have created an extraordinary spatial setting within Kumu’s Great Hall, giving the artworks both light and air while allowing visitors to “drift” freely among them.

The architectural aspect of the exhibition is extremely important to me—it is not a conventional exhibition design, but rather a painting of space - Kristi Kongi

The artist and architects began collaborating two and a half years before the exhibition opened.

I had never before experienced someone approaching me so early to discuss exhibition design. We had the wonderful opportunity to visit the exhibition hall as an almost completely empty white space, which felt like a blank canvas. We wanted to open all the windows and bring as much sunlight into the room as possible. During our very first brainstorming session, the staircase motif emerged. The staircases now exist as physical objects in the exhibition hall and courtyard, and as visual motifs in Kristi’s paintings - architect Mari Hunt

Kongi adds that she created small colored-pencil studies for the large paintings.

Usually I already have the concepts in my head. For many of the works in Chromatic Drift, I didn’t, because I wanted time to ‘move’ the idea forward. For many paintings, the vision appeared immediately, including the color palette. I used to plan much more, but this time I wanted things to happen naturally and to allow myself the freedom for intuition to guide me—to collect ‘something’ from the air.

The exhibition also includes 180 ceramic tiles created during an artist residency in Mexico. 

It was literally the most intense period of my life. Painting can be intense as well, but there I structure my days differently. At the residency, I worked in the factory every day from eight in the morning until five or half past five. I wanted to make 500 tiles, but ended up with just over two hundred because several weeks’ worth became waste due to failed experiments

Two series of small watercolor works are also included in the exhibition. “These highly emotional, simple freehand drawings with explanatory texts helped me survive the intense work process,” says the artist. Her work and artistic practice are explored in the accompanying publication by Colombian-born curator Sara Garzón, based in the United States, art historian and critic Sirje Helme, and the exhibition’s curator and book editor, Ann Mirjam Vaikla.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by Sara Garzón, Sirje Helme, and Ann Mirjam Vaikla, offering insights into Kongi’s work and artistic practice. The catalogue’s graphic designer is Brit Pavelson. The publication includes extensive visual material documenting both the works created for the exhibition and the multi-year creative process in the artist’s Tallinn studio and at the Cerámica Suro residency in Guadalajara, Mexico.