15.09.1942–10.05.2020
Mare Vint
Mare Vint trained as a glass artist but became known as a graphic artist: from the 1970s she worked mainly in lithography and drew “ideal landscapes” of gardens, parks and cityscapes. Her work was shown at the biennials in Rijeka and Ljubljana and at the Tallinn Print Triennials, and is held in museums in Tallinn, Moscow, Cologne and Washington.
Biography
The list of Mare Vint’s awards begins in 1972, with a prize at the drawing biennial in Rijeka. She was thirty.
She was born on 15 September 1942 in Tallinn, and her maiden name was Mänd; in Soviet documents she appeared as Mare Johannesovna Vint. In 1961 she finished Tallinn Secondary School No. 9. From 1962 to 1967 she studied at the Estonian SSR State Art Institute (now the Estonian Academy of Arts) and received a diploma as a glass artist. Graphic art did not figure in that diploma, and yet it was what she took up. From 1967 to 1969 she taught drawing at Tallinn School No. 46 (today Pelgulinna Gymnasium), then became a freelance artist.
She began to exhibit in 1968, showing coloured pencil and ink drawings, then lithography and screen printing. From 1972 lithography became her main technique. She worked almost always on paper and moved to canvas only in her later years. She was a member of the Estonian Artists’ Union (the professional association of artists in Estonia) from 1973, and of the Association of Estonian Printmakers from 1992. In the 1970s and 1980s she took part in international biennials; she belonged to the circle of the Estonian avant-garde, which had links with Russian underground artists of the time, but I have not found details of those contacts.
Her work of the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s is built on black-and-white contrast, with colour used conditionally, more to mark a place. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, the space of her sheets is often filled with gardens, parks and cities. The motifs are put together from a fine, at times filigree line, dots, rhythms and the bare surface of the paper. Her search for balance between what people build and nature is called the “ideal landscape”. Among her known works are the lithographs “Balcony” (1973), “Brick Wall” (1977), “In the Big Forest” (1978) and “Tension II” (1995), and the India ink drawing “Four Women” (1977). The Estonian Museum of Architecture linked her aesthetic with Japanese economy of expression, with allusion and emptiness; in her architectural motifs the same museum also saw an echo of postmodernism, which came into the Estonian art scene with the young architects of the 1970s. To my mind, this comparison looks more convincing on the sheets of the 1980s than on the early ones.
She won many prizes. Her work received special prizes at the Tallinn Print Triennial in 1977 and 1992 and diplomas at the triennial in 1986 and 1989; in 1975 she was given a city prize at the graphic arts biennial in Ljubljana. In 1984 she received the Jaan Jensen Prize for book graphics, in 2001 the Kristjan Raud Prize, in 2007 the Gallery G Prize in Tallinn, and in 2009 a diploma at the MANU PROPRIA exhibition. In 2015 she was awarded the Order of the White Star, Class IV, and in 2019 the Prize of the Fund for Visual and Applied Arts for outstanding achievement: the jury spoke of half a century of minimalist graphic work in search of an ideal balance of space.
Her sheets are held by the Art Museum of Estonia, the Adamson-Eric Museum, the Tartu Art Museum, the Pushkin Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Library of Congress in the United States, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey and the Lappeenranta Art Museum.
Mare Vint died on 10 May 2020.
Profile notes