Deborah Schamoni

Opening 05.12., 6–8 pm


We are pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Estonian painter Mariann Metsis in Germany.

Mariann Metsis (b. 1991, Tallinn) is a London based painter. Her work layers colors and textures, figures and abstraction, building on her experiences, growing up directly after the collapse of the soviet union. On Metsis’ canvases different painting styles merge, some of the paintings want to hand themselves over to us, others hide in the hue. Depicting a moment stuck within an absurdity of familiar and eerie, the subjects perform for the canvas. Metsis cuts the linearity of historical reference by working in a zone influenced by the propaganda infused traces of Socialist Realism and the hyper commercialized moment of contemporary. Her landscapes are neither entirely real nor entirely imagined; they exist in the space where ideology collapses into fatuity. Through the work, Metsis ruminates about how history functions: the past is not dead; it insists, returns, and contaminates the present. Her nonlinear treatment of time thus reveals the illusion of historical progress, unfolding in the pentimenti of the painting. 

Mariann Metsis lives and works in London. She studied at Central Saint Martin College of Art & Design, London; The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; and obtained a BA in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Selected exhibitions include Shifting Sand, Galerija Asni, Riga; bending spines, curated by Antoine Simeāo Schalk, Berlin; Life Under, Galerina, London, maalid2020, Hiob Gallery, Tallinn; just as when the night at Light Eye Mind; Paintings for the Temple of Love, Cob Gallery, London; and Cities Methodologies, Slade Research Centre, London. Her writing has been published in Manhole Journal.

Text: Niina Ulfsak