Jaan Elken
Tallinn, Estonia
5 Works exhibited on Kooness
Current location
Tallinn, Estonia
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Works by Jaan Elken
Jaan Elken (1954) graduated the Estonian Academy of Arts in Architecture in 1977. The artist received recognition as a hyperrealist but transitioned into abstractionism in his later work, playing with (urban) landscapes and fragments of thought that focus on personal experience rather than hyperrealistic photogenicity. You can often find text passages from everyday experience as well as readymades in the artist's work which can simultaneously be viewed through the prism of irony and nostalgia. His contemporary work is a poeticisation of the present world through a powerful abstract painting aesthetic which has made Elken one of the most important representatives of the abstract direction in Estonian painting.