Eesti kunsti oksjonid

Mixed media on paper. 1993.
Signature: EÕ 93

One of the most unique Estonian surrealists of the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s is Ervin Õunapuu (b. 1956) whose watercolor in a similar format “Frozen Stronger” was shown at the exhibition “Surrealism 100. Prague, Tartu and Other Stories” which opened at the Estonian National Museum in the spring of 2024.

The main motif in Õunapuu’s work is the oval figure placed in paradoxical situations, which, in a further development of the egg image popular in the work of other surrealists, takes the form of a dark olive. In the creation of images and the characterization of the characters, Õunapuu perceives a spiritual kinship with Bosch and Brueghel the Elder but Õunapuu’s morality is something else entirely – anticlerical.

In “The Fall of the Olive” we also see a woman with a frightened expression watching an incredible story or miracle: a giant olive that has fallen from somewhere high, probably from the sky, breaks the trunk of a tree as it falls. Õunapuu places the scene in a metaphysical desert landscape, which is the main environment of his philosophical-surrealist work. The atmosphere of the birth of a miracle is amplified by stormy weather as the central mood creator of the composition.

Text: Harry Liivrand, Katre Palm