Kristi Kongi
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2022
1985
Estonia
Kogo
Kristi Kongi (born 1985) is a painter and installation artist whose work focuses on colour, light, and space. Her bright coloured paintings often take the form of impressive installations made for specific settings creating effect that Estonian art critic Elnara Taidre described as “painting within a painting” or meta-painting. Besides painting on canvas, walls, floors and ceilings, she also uses various coloured materials such as fabric, plywood and acrylic plastic to create her installations. Her works are based on specific or imagined places, and her observations, emotions and memories. Kristi Kongi is using thorough research and experiments in painting where she trials various colours, light and shade. Artist refers to these experiments as “Exercises with the moon”. Her work is both poetic – this is also expressed in the titles – as well as systematic and analytical.
Kristi Kongi studied painting at Tartu Art College (2004–2008) and completed her master’s degree in painting at the Estonian Academy of Arts (2008–2011). She has been awarded the Young Artist Prize (2011), Sadolin Art Prize (2013), Konrad Mägi Prize (2017) and in 2016 was nominated for the Köler Prize. Kristi Kongi is an associate professor in the painting department at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Occasionally she also works as exhibition designer.
"During the recent years, as I travel around, I have written down the names of colours. I have discovered that by describing these places in this way, according to colours, my recollection of the experience is more precise and true. We each understand and perceive colours differently. When I paint I think of colour as a symbol. When I tell stories I am also influenced by the historical significance of colours. How colours have spoken at different times. I tell stories through colours."
Kristi Kongi
Kongi uses a series of watercolours as a visual idea bank for subsequent works. With this oil painting she has transferred some of the ideas and colours from the watercolours and created an emotional landscape of Estonia, adding also a light, warm breeze of colour from her memories of Mexico.
Kristi Kongi. ...and Other Shades of Light, together with Krista Mölder, Tallinn Art Hall, 2022. Photo by Paul Kuimet
During lockdown due to global pandemic, Kristi Kongi spent a lot of time in her studio in a relatively safe space compared to other people around the world. Almost unconsciously she started to look up at the sky through her studio windows. There she found the space we all share regardless of our geographical location and political, economic or social situation. Kongi started to paint watercolours, which can be seen as diary entries made during the pandemic. These works are like modern versions of Très Riches Heures, the famous 15th century book of hours, piece by piece revealing the troubled world we ...
Kristi Kongi. ...and Other Shades of Light, together with Krista Mölder, Tallinn Art Hall, 2022. Photo by Paul Kuimet
15 February 2021. So cold and bright and endless is an oil paintings from Sky series which got its idea from observing the sky and thinking about the meaning of the heaven while world is alerted by climate crises messages, geopolitical instabilities in Europe and Asia and tortured by pandemic. When Kongi started the project, she chose a specific time in a day – twilight, the moment when one can find a whole spectrum of colours in the sky – and created her first paintings. Twilight creates shapes around the sky, the movement of light that can be traced from dusk to darkness. As a result the physical, ...
Kristi Kongi. ...and Other Shades of Light, together with Krista Mölder, Tallinn Art Hall, 2022. Photo by Paul Kuimet
This oil painting was first presented at Kristi Kongi’s solo show Shimmering star Magenta. Was it a dream or was it real? The main theme of the exhibition was colour and the journey of colours. A journey from one place to another. Or for example, a journey home from some place. From the studio to home. Or a journey from Tallinn to Tartu or Tartu to Tallinn. Journeys are endless. Kongi considers the journey inside a person to be the main thing. Which has a beginning and an end, but everything can also be endless. Every moment has its own journey, which is mostly affected by outside forces. We are cha ...
Kristi Kongi solo exhibition Shimmering Star Magenta. Was It A Dream Or Was It Real, Kogo gallery, 2021. Photo by Marje Eelma
Other art projects
Kristi Kongi. To Hide Yourself. Is There Any Light Left? Lemon Yellow? Golden Ochre? Magenta? Where Are You Now? Painting installation from processual event Savage, Drusti, Latvia, 2021. Photo by Reinis Hofmanis
Selected Press
The tour de force that is Kristi Kongi’s world of colours. Elnara Taidre looks at Kristi Kongi’s painting practice of recent years.
Magazine of Art and Visual Culture KUNST.EE, 3/2021.
Photo reportage from the exhibition Let me dream once more at Narva Museum Art Gallery.
EchoGoneWron ...