At the end of March, an exhibition of the well-known Estonian painter Konrad Mägi was opened at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Alongside Mägi’s works, the contemporary artist Kristina Õllek has created a powerful site-specific installation in the Gallery Mausoleum in response to the work of Konrad Mägi, opening up a dialogue between past and present. The installation is based on Õllek’s long-term research into the ecology of the Baltic Sea, reflecting the sea’s current state and revealing the geological era of ancient marine life preserved in Estonia’s coastal landscape. This temporal dimension is visible in the Silurian limestone of Saaremaa, an island that also influenced the work of Konrad Mägi. Between Sediments and Dead Zones is a monument to the oxygen-deprived areas of the Baltic Sea – the “dead zones” – depicting the aquatic environment within the spatial and symbolic context of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s mausoleum.
The exhibition is accompanied by a book introducing Konrad Mägi’s work, which also includes an overview of the works by Kristina Õllek on display. On 11 July from 18.30, a conversation between the curator Kathleen Soriano and artist Kristina Õllek will take place.
The exhibition will remain open at the Dulwich Picture Gallery through July 12.
Kristina Õllek (b. 1989) is a visual artist living and working in Tallinn who uses photography, video and installation in her work. Guided by research and speculative thinking, she addresses marine ecology, geological material and man-made environments in her work. She earned her bachelor’s (2013) and master’s (2016) degrees from the Department of Photography at the Estonian Academy of Arts and furthered her studies at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam and the Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. Õllek has received the Young Artist Award (2023 and 2016) of the Estonian Academy of Arts and was granted an artist laureate salary from 2023 to 2025. Her works are currently on view in group exhibitions at the Estonian Museum of Architecture in Tallinn, the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK, the National Art Gallery in Sopot, Poland and the Pauls Stradiņš Museum of the History of Medicine in Riga. Her works are part of the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia, the Museum of Photography in Winterthur, the European Central Bank and the New York Public Library, as well as being included in several private collections across Europe. Kristina Õllek is represented by the Kogo Gallery.
Dulwich Picture Gallery is the world’s first building specifically constructed as a public art gallery, having opened in 1811. In recent years, the gallery has brought major retrospective exhibitions of several Scandinavian and Baltic artists to British audiences, including the works of Tove Jansson, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, Harald Sohlberg and Anna Ancher.