Lilian Mosolainen “Every Departure An Arrival”

11.10.2021

”EVERY DEPARTURE AN ARRIVAL”
Paintings 1991(1987)-2021

Exhibition on four floors
1.10.-20.11.2021

Curator Jana Wiebe (DE)

Lilian Mosolainen (1961) appeared in Estonian art life on the wave of late 1980s neo-expressionism as a member of the initial nucleus of Group T, reintroducing powerful animism and androgynous eroticism into Estonian art, the earlier manifestations of which played a significant role in the Young Estonia movement.

Mirjam Peil: To her fellow fighters, expressionism remained just a phase, whereas Lilian Mosolainen has contributed to intense expressionism and emotionality throughout her creative life. Many art historians have pointed out the split structures of her paintings, dialogues between drawing and colour, complementing and opening up one another, seemingly independent.

In her paintings, Lilian Mosolainen forcefully tackles charged existential themes, seeing human life as a cycle of nature and perceiving death as part of life.

The title of my exhibition is: “Every Departure An Arrival”

The exhibition includes works with an existential undertone or 44+1 paintings from the last 30 years, examining eternal topics, such as love and rebirth. These themes should not leave anyone cold, and at the same time the reflections on the fugacity and permanence of everything, and on the temporal and the timeless constitute the source of every thinking person's creativity. As the Estonian poet Artur Alliksaar said: Death spreads like threshold through dawn, but what has been is not destroyed as memory survives.

With such a profound topic there is always a danger of taste errors and being excessively pathetic, the way out here are creativity and playfulness, which in turn offer a ray of hope in our mundane civilisation, where consumer mentality is expanding and where the shortcoming of urban society is the weakening link with nature and the creator.

Or, again going back to Alliksaar: We have no reason to complain about being suffocated by anxiety, as long as the heart is not broken and we are attracted by playing games.

I advise to interpret the title of the exhibition in an existentialist key. Departing and arriving in the title do not only mean entering and leaving, but they afford the display a broader meaning that deals with the mysteries of birth and death. I do not think that my pictures, despite the serious theme, are really morbid: instead they are bright because of their aspiration to see charm and beauty and just a little sadness in the cycle of nature. I remind the viewers that all my recent exhibitions bear the titles that refer to the finality of human

existence: “Seventh Heaven”, “Calm My Heart”, “I am a Meadow Full of Blooms”. The last titles, however, should not be taken too dramatically; “Calm My Heart” does not mean “bury my heart”, but “ease the pain of my heart”, and coming and going can be interpreted as a promise to the beloved: “I will come when snow has fallen...”

I hereby finish the brief introduction once again with my favourite poet Alliksaar:

People are born although they have to die, and they fall in love despite disappointments, without really seeking, a soul finds beauty, amazingly fine and sad.

Lilian Mososlainen

Additional information:
Kadriorg Gallery
Vesivärava 50, Tallinn
Mon-Sat 9.00-19.30

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Lilian Mosolainen “Every Departure An Arrival”