Lola Liivat

Biography

In the summer of 1957 Lola Liivat found herself at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow. There the American artists Harry and Katherine Colman gave a lecture on contemporary abstract painting, and Harry Colman demonstrated his technique in public. Liivat listened and watched. Later she began to paint abstract works, and that day is usually named as the turning point in her biography.

She was born on 17 August 1928 in Tallinn. When she was about four, the family moved to Rakvere. In 1941 she finished primary school there and completed two years at the Rakvere commercial gymnasium, then continued her studies in Tallinn, at Secondary School No. 4, from which she graduated in 1946. From 1948 to 1954 Liivat studied at the Tartu State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR. In 1951 the institute was moved to Tallinn and merged with the institute of applied art, so for part of her course she was already at the new institution, the State Art Institute of the Estonian SSR (by other accounts, her studies continued at the Tartu branch). Until 1967 she used the surname Makarova, later became Liivat-Makarova, and then simply Liivat.

In 1954 she began teaching at the Tartu art school: painting, composition and drawing. She taught there until 1983. For the next five years she worked as a freelance artist, and from 1988 to 1994 she taught in the painting department in Tartu (until 1992 this was the Tartu painting branch of the Tallinn art institute, afterwards part of the University of Tartu). In 1994–1995 she worked as a gallerist at the Rüütli gallery. She was admitted to the Artists’ Union of the Estonian SSR, the official professional body of Soviet artists, as a candidate member in 1957 and became a full member in 1960. From 1988 to 1992 she chaired the Tartu art society Pallas, and from 1997 to 2000 the Tartu branch of the Artists’ Union. In 1991 she was among the founders of the Tartu Richard Wagner Society and in the same year joined the Zonta club in Tartu.

Her painting is classed as abstract expressionism; she also worked in a manner known as process painting. In the Soviet period, according to the available information, she was forbidden to exhibit for fifteen years. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1969 at the Tallinn Art Salon. Solo shows followed in Tallinn, Tartu, Helsinki, Chicago, Stockholm and Copenhagen: “Mini Abstract Compositions” at the Draakon gallery (1986), the anniversary retrospective “Abstractionist” at the Tartu Art Museum (1998), “All” at the Tallinn Art Hall (2008). In all, she took part in more than a hundred exhibitions.

In the summer of 2018, for her ninetieth birthday, the Tartu Art Museum opened the exhibition “Lola Liivat. Resistance of the Spirit”. It is the largest retrospective of her abstract work.

Her awards include the Ado Vabbe Prize (1998), the Order of the White Star, medal class (2001), the Konrad Mäe Prize (2008) and the AkzoNobel Art Prize (2019).

Lola Liivat died on 6 May 2025, aged 96. She is buried in Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn.