Eesti kunsti oksjonid

Etching on paper. 1977.
Signature: “Trikk” ofort / M. Mutsu 77

“Don’t say ‘no’,
that word doesn’t exist;
“Life is just “yes””

Excerpt from a poem by Marju Mutsu

Marju Mutsu (1941-1980) was an innovator in Estonian graphic art, who, by working with metal plates differently than most graphic artists, took etching as a means of expression to a completely new level in the 1970s. Her works, with their strong emotional and aesthetic charge, have a lot of empty space on the surface of the picture. Scratches, barely perceptible fragments and sometimes incomprehensible objects depicted on the plate stare back from this. Art historian Elnara Taidre has written about these objects as separate objects in space that the characters in the picture cannot see, because they appear outside the diegesis or narrative (like music in a film that comes from outside what is happening in the film – for example, sound effects or the narrator’s voice). These are objects that are addressed to the viewer of a work of art with the task of intriguing, increasing curiosity or focusing attention.

Mutsu also had a special skill in capturing an elusive moment or a fun mood in her images, which in this work is the intriguing pose resulting from the legs raised behind the neck by a highly flexible acrobat. It has been written before that her images free the viewer from masks, because the viewer unexpectedly finds in the work something that they are not used to seeing – at least not in art. The nonconformism and surprise effect of such acrobatic techniques have not lost their authenticity to this day.

The work is reproduced in the artist’s monography “Marju Mutsu” on page 177 (Tallinn 2009) and is also part of the collection of the Art Museum of Estonia.

 Text: Vappu Thurlow