Merike Estna: Painting as a Living Organism

Merike Estna – There are two parallel lines within the project, both equally important to me. The first emerges from the discourse around painting. For several years, I have been exploring how painting might behave as a living organism. If everything in the contemporary world is constantly changing, moving and becoming increasingly fluid, how can painting respond?

I began experimenting with paintings placed directly on gallery floors. When visitors step on a painting and move across it, there are almost infinite ways of seeing it. In this sense, the painting remains alive and open. From there, I started creating paintings as stages and inviting other people to perform on them, or using paintings as picnic blankets: places where people could meet, exchange ideas and have conversations. I have also worked extensively with painted tiles, as you can see here.

In recent years, however, I have returned to canvas and started asking myself how a painting on canvas could acquire the same vitality. Shortly before applying for the pavilion, I realised that a canvas is most alive while it is still being born in the studio. I therefore proposed exposing that process and placing the emphasis on becoming rather than on the finished result.

At the same time, I have been looking increasingly at the history of women painters, several of whom are referenced in the pavilion. On the floor, for example, there is a portrait of Lavinia Fontana, the sixteenth-century Italian painter who is considered one of the first professional women artists in Europe. She ran a studio under her own name, and her marriage contract even established that she would be responsible for earning the family’s income through her work rather than managing the household. She nevertheless gave birth to eleven children and remained an extraordinarily prolific painter.

There is also a reference to Marietta Robusti, known as La Tintoretta, the daughter of Tintoretto. Through her, we wanted to evoke all the women painters who have been left, in a sense, without works, because they often did not sign their paintings or because their authorship was attributed to male relatives. In response to this history, I began the pavilion on 6 May with an empty canvas, positioning myself, too, as a pittore senza opera—a painter without works.

The final art-historical reference on the floor is Paula Modersohn-Becker, who is considered the first known woman artist to paint a nude self-portrait and one of the earliest modern artists to depict motherhood from a woman’s own perspective. Motherhood is also a central theme in this pavilion.

Together with curator Natalia Sielewicz, we chose the monumental scale of the canvas while reflecting upon the history of painting. Traditionally, works of this size would not have been entrusted to women artists; their subjects would also have been religious, political or related to war. My painting, instead, centres on motherhood.

ME – The Estonian Pavilion moves around Venice, so the venue is usually selected in relation to the artist and the project. I already had the idea of exposing the process of making a monumental painting, but when we entered this space for the first time, its visible layers immediately struck me. It was originally a church and is now actively used by the local community, particularly as an after-school basketball court for children.

The architecture itself seems to have been constructed as a collage. Its different histories have not been completely blended or concealed; they remain visible, layer upon layer. This is also how I work with painting. Even when the entire surface appears to be covered, the painting may be nowhere near finished. I build it through successive layers, almost as if I were working in Photoshop: there is always a complete layer underneath, although only fragments of it may remain visible in the final work.

It was equally important that the building was still genuinely used by the community. Entering it from the street, I felt that I had suddenly arrived in a real part of Venice. Children play here, and families gather in the courtyard to celebrate birthdays. That dimension of everyday life is essential to the pavilion.

The tiled floor will not remain here after the Biennale, because the room will return to being a basketball court. The tiles are installed using double-sided carpet tape and each one is numbered, so the work can be removed and reinstalled elsewhere.

ME – I see the floor as a kind of mind map for the entire exhibition. Alongside the references to women artists, it introduces ideas around labour and domestic work, particularly the forms of daily labour connected to motherhood and care: things that require constant attention but are never truly completed.

One of the references is an Estonian runic song that Natalia and I found in the Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu. It describes women raking the sea, which is a beautiful metaphor for work that leaves no visible trace and can never be finished. Yet as the women rake the sea, a bird emerges from the waves, lays eggs and hatches them; from those eggs come the sun, the moon and Jupiter. It is a story of world-making through everyday, collective labour.

We approach the pavilion in a similar way. The painting requires daily attention in order to come into being.

There are also many vessels. I have long been interested in the vessel as a metaphor: it can suggest a person or a body, something capable of containing other things while also having the potential to remain empty.

The bench is also very important because it is something people can actually use. For a long time, I have tried to move towards a kind of painting that enters real life instead of remaining sterile inside a museum. I want the painting to come towards people, rather than expecting people to approach it as an untouchable object. Both the bench and the painted floor allow that to happen.

ME – I have the entire Biennale available, but I hope to finish the painting by the end of September. After that, it will need time to dry and visitors will be able to experience it more as a completed work.

At the same time, I regard that date as a possibility rather than an absolute deadline. It is very difficult to determine exactly when a painting is finished. Until then, the work remains an open process.

ME – When I first became a mother, I did not immediately make work about motherhood. It was only when my older child was one or two years old that I began a large painting depicting him.

While making it, I kept telling the painter friends who visited my studio that I was creating it only for myself. Eventually, I realised that I was almost ashamed of painting the subject. Motherhood still does not seem to be considered a particularly desirable or serious subject in contemporary painting—especially when it is addressed by an artist who is herself a mother. Nobody seems to mind when someone else paints it.

That discomfort made me increasingly interested in the subject. We can paint anything: there are good and bad paintings of every possible subject. What matters is not the subject itself, but how we approach it.

When I became pregnant with my second child, I also began researching women painters and writers from the past, trying to understand how they reconciled their creative lives with motherhood. Historically, childbirth was closely connected to death. The moment of birth marked a very narrow boundary between something coming into being and something being lost. Women frequently died giving birth, and children often lost either their lives or their mothers. I became increasingly absorbed by these histories and by the ways creative work and motherhood coexisted within them.

In the pavilion, motherhood is connected to care and maintenance. A monumental painting like this requires time, attention and daily care. The idea of revealing the process also became fully clear to me through motherhood, which taught me to appreciate becoming rather than always aiming towards completion.

ME – I have become increasingly interested in that history. I previously made a series of Madonna paintings, which is reproduced in the pavilion’s book. My Madonnas are faceless, so they could be anyone. They are less about a specific religious identity than about the act of caring for another person.

In my paintings of the Madonna and Child, the relationship can also appear as a kind of explosion—something extremely powerful. The works contain historical references, but I try to open the image up and consider what it might mean today.

ME – The title emerged through a dialogue with Keiu Krikmann. We wanted it to evoke an environment in which painting is never fixed or fully contained, but remains a continuous, unfolding event. The image of a leaking sky also suggests something fluid and porous: painting moving beyond the canvas and entering the architecture, the objects and the rhythms of everyday life.

ME – Venice is very good for me, both personally and creatively. I love being surrounded by water and spending time on the water. This relates to the fluidity that I explore in painting: the sense that everything is continually moving, changing and remaining alive.

On a practical level, living here with a family can be quite challenging. We have two children, one aged one and the other five, and we cross a private bridge to reach our house, which is good exercise when I am alone with the pram!

Living in Venice is very different from living in a conventional city, where you can simply order your groceries and have everything delivered. Yet I find it deeply peaceful. I live about fifteen minutes away from the pavilion, in a very quiet neighbourhood. There are no cars, the city is surrounded by water, and you can hear the sounds of nature.

ME – We were based in Mexico City for about three years, although we returned to Estonia frequently. My older child attended kindergarten there, so it became our main home for that period. We moved back to Estonia last August.

My surroundings always influence my work, although not in a literal way. I do not see a boat and then paint a boat. It is more about a sensibility towards colour, light and intensity.

My work became much more intense—and perhaps slightly more anxious—while we were living in Mexico, because everything there is so intense: the colours, the light and the people. It is beautiful, but very different from Estonia, which is much quieter and darker. These contrasting atmospheres inevitably become part of the work.

ME – It is always a mixture of the two. I deliberately did not prepare a sketch before arriving in Venice because I wanted the painting to be born here. I did not want simply to reproduce something that had already been decided elsewhere.

I began by pouring paint onto the canvas and only then started to sketch, which is often how I work. This allows the painting to respond to the space and to the behaviour of the material itself—the way the paint flows across the canvas. The choice of colours is quite intuitive.

Now I have developed a larger preparatory drawing that I am loosely following. A huge figure is beginning to emerge, and there will eventually be legs in one section. Some parts will remain quite dark, while others are intensely colourful. Certain areas are beginning to come together, but there is still a great deal of work ahead.

ME – The painting will be shown in Estonia next year, together with the tiled floor and other works connected to the pavilion. The exhibition is scheduled to open at Tallinn Art Hall on 27 August 2027.

I conceive of it as one monumental painting, but it is made up of twenty-two separate canvases. I hope that these individual paintings will travel independently and eventually come together again in future exhibitions. In this way, they can each develop a life of their own.