“Transitions” deals with a conflict between the artificial and the natural, testifying that the power of the beauty around us is far from faded. The curator of the exhibition is Tamara Luuk.

According to the curator, Urmas Pedanik is best known for his paintings depicting the industrial world of electronics, with which he left his mark in the history of Estonian art in the 1970s: “These works introduced in Estonia a pure, unprecedented photorealistic camera eye erasing the personality of the author, which became a landmark both in our art history as well as his own work.”

Pedanik held his first solo exhibition in 1981. After a long pause, his next show took place at the City Gallery in 2010. Analogue technology in the artist’s pictures had been replaced by digital, and the manual skills previously used to create a painterly image had given way to computer processing.

In “Transitions”, the painted canvas with self-contained electronic gadgets evolves into a story that unfolds from the conflict between nature and the world of technology. An anonymous mechanical machine pushes through the reeds, invading the lake surface, the sky and the space between the mountains like a menacing army, until the artist finally chooses a side and … ends the exhibition with a realistic-looking waterfall free from any interferers. The image based on a computer-processed photograph features a simple, almost romantic motif of a powerful cascade.

Accompanying the exhibition will be the third catalogue documenting the artist’s work, with text written by Tamara Luuk.