Kadri Mälk

Biography

Kadri Mälk’s first solo exhibition opened in 1989 in the gallery of the Tallinn Art Hall. The display cases were designed by the interior designer Pille Lausmäe, and the show was later repeated at the Tartu Art Museum. The artist was thirty-one, and she already had a prize for the best young applied artist of the year (1987) behind her.

She was born on 27 January 1958 in Tallinn with the surname Sõerd; she took the name Mälk from her first marriage, in 1976. An only child, the daughter of a doctor and a psychologist, she often spent her childhood with her grandfather in Abja-Paluoja. Until 1976 she attended a secondary school in Tallinn, then the Tartu Art School in the department of painting and stage decoration (1977–1981, graduating with distinction). She studied jewellery at the Estonian State Art Institute under Professor Leili Kuldkepp, finishing the course in 1986. Later Mälk would publish a book about her teacher, “The Teacher” (2022).

From 1986 to 1993 she worked as a freelance artist; from 1989 she taught at the art university in Tallinn, and in 1996 she became professor of jewellery design and metalwork at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and in 2022 professor emerita. She also continued her training abroad: in 1993–1994 she studied gemmology at the Lahti Institute of Design under Esko Timonen, then worked in Bernd Munsteiner’s lapidary studio in Germany, and improved her stone-working skills in St Petersburg as well. As a visiting teacher she gave courses in several countries, beginning in 1996 at the Royal College of Art in London and ending in the autumns of 2015 and 2016 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2003 she spent time on a residency in Portugal.

In 1999 Mälk founded a group of jewellers, “Castle in the Air” (õhuLoss), and in 2008 a charitable foundation, “Young Estonia Jewellery” (Noor Eesti Ehe), which supported young makers. Twice, in 2005 and 2012, she was guest editor of special issues of the magazine Kunst.ee devoted to jewellery. From 2008 she worked with the German publisher Arnoldsche; the monographs “Testament” (2016) and “Hunt” (2020) came out. Estonian catalogues and her own books, among them “Millennium” (1997), “Nocturnus” (2002) and “On Iron” (2013), make up about ten further publications.

Her exhibitions took place in Tampere, Brussels, Aigle, Munich, Gothenburg, Porto, Lisbon, Cagnes-sur-Mer and Amsterdam. In 2000–2001 the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design showed her “Archipelago. Longing”, and in 2010 she exhibited at the Dominican Monastery in Tallinn. Her work was shown in Latvia, Lithuania, Germany, Denmark, Russia, the United States, South Korea, Japan and other countries. Besides London and Zurich, her jewellery was acquired by the Smithsonian museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the museums of applied art in Berlin and Hamburg. From 2015 Mälk also painted icons. In 2004 the director Marianne Kõrver made a documentary film about her, “The Dark Sky of Imagination”.

The list of her awards could go on for a long time. The Grand Prix of the Fourth Applied Art Triennial of Estonia (1988), the Kristjan Raud Prize (1994, and again in 2017), the Estonian State Cultural Award (1998), the Officer’s Cross of the Portuguese Order of Merit (2003), the Ted Noten gold prize in Amsterdam (2004), the Grand Prix of the European Triennial of Contemporary Jewellery in Belgium (2005), the Bavarian State Prize (2016) and the Order of the White Star, Fifth Class (2017).

To my mind, the “Testament” exhibition at St Nicholas’ Church, where the jewellery was shown in a Gothic church, explains her manner best: sombre stones and dark metals, presented almost as relics.

Kadri Mälk died on 1 January 2023 in Tallinn, twenty-six days before her sixty-fifth birthday. She is buried at Pärnamäe Cemetery in Tallinn.