Estonia artist Merike Estna did something extremely unusual for the Venice Biennale, even by its own standards. Over the past five months, she created paintings live in front of daily visitors. The result is 22 canvases which explore the themes of motherhood and feminism.
Visitors to the Estonian pavilion at this year's Venice International Art Biennale may have been surprised to see the country's representative Merike Estna in person, creating her latest works.
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT
During the past five months, right before people's eyes, she has methodically made The House of Leaking Sky exhibition which consists of 22 large canvases.
"The pavilion shows three monumental works. The long bench that is 26 metres. Then the floor [25,000 tiles] people walk on, which I think of kind of as a mind map for the project and then the painting behind me which I started with empty canvas," Esta told Euronews Culture earlier this month.
Motherhood and female art history
Motherhood and female art history were the inspiration for creating the space. It has an extra significant meaning knowing that Estna recently gave birth. She was still on maternity leave with her younger child while preparing to come to Venice and work on the biggest project in her career for five full months, live in front of the visiting audience.
As curator, Natalia Sielewicz, emphasizes in her curatorial text, Estna braids together meditations on motherhood and the lineages of women artists who carved paths toward artistic self-determination.
"As a working mother herself, she often folds complex iconographies of care, lineage, and inheritance into her practice," she wrote.
Sielewicz reminds visitors of the existence of pittore senza opera - the painter without works, most often embodied by women whose oeuvres were absorbed into patriarchal workshops or erased from official chronicles.
"Marietta Robusti Tintoretta was one of them: a Venetian painter-poet who dressed as a boy to work beside her father, Jacopo Tintoretto, in the heat of the family atelier. Her paintings circulated without her name, her skill credited upward; she died in childbirth before she had the chance to fully step into the light of her own authorship," she wrote.
Living in Venice with her family throughout the Biennale, Estna brings motherhood into the conceptual structure of the project and found the experience to be extremely useful for both her and her children. "It is a complicated city to live with a family and to live with small children," Estna said. "My older kid lost his scooter on the first morning of his arrival [in] the canal. Our youngest only learned to walk a couple of months ago. So it's been a challenge, but also... I really love challenges, I think it always gives us new ideas and drives us, leads us to different thoughts."
Living space
Estna created her studio and exhibition inside of the former Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Venice’s Castello district, which was later used as a community space and gymnasium. These overlapping sacred, civic and everyday histories form an active backdrop for her evolving work.
"This studio space, what Merike created, is really like a living space. The painting has changed and then evolved so much throughout those past five months. It is really active and happy place, I would say. Many people who are living in Venice they keep returning," said Maria Arusoo, Commissioner of Estonian Pavilion at la Biennale di Venezia.
"People really want to ask questions, reflect, talk, just sit around."
For Merike visitors were crucial and she wanted them always to be taken care of. "They're definitely not intruders at the pavilion and the main idea to show the painting how it is born, it only carries when people actually visit and see and so this is an important part of the pavillion".
At first she was anxious, but later on these conditions reminded her of being back at the art academy where she always shared a studio and tried to focus by wearing headphones while others were chatting.
Politics and protests
The 61st Venice Art Biennale kicked off with enormous controversy as several countries and artists protested against the organiser's decision to invite Russia to open its pavilion in Giardini, one of the two main spaces of the Biennale.
Maria Arusoo, Commissioner of the Estonian Pavilion told Euronews Culture that art can never be separated from politics.
"Merike said this really beautiful and sad thing, that we [Estonia] were 60 years not part of this dialogue and not part of the Biennial because of Russia, because we were occupied and we couldn't be part as an independent country. So we won't step back because they decide to join."
The protest against the Russian pavilion ended in front of the Estonian pavilion on the opening day of the Biennale. Estna signed also an open letter against the Israeli pavilion.
The 61st International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale closes on Sunday, 22 November 2026.
