Marta Stratskas opens Rändajad exhibition in Tallinn

Estonian painter Marta Stratskas has opened her solo exhibition Rändajad at the gallery of St John’s Church in Tallinn, ERR reported. The exhibition features large-format paintings created over the past year and explores closeness, change and the journey through life.

Curated by Erkki Juhandi, the exhibition approaches life as a process of constant movement and transformation. Stratskas’s figures appear in undefined, sometimes dreamlike spaces, while their relationships often remain unresolved. The works bring together intimacy and separation, meeting and withdrawal, loss and change.

“This is a series of paintings about people through different stages of life, different relationships and inner states. Here, the journey does not mean so much physical movement as constant change, searching and moving from one state to another,” Stratskas said.

The exhibition’s title refers also to J. R. R. Tolkien’s idea that not everyone who wanders is lost. For Stratskas, wandering is not necessarily connected to a specific starting point or destination, but rather to a person’s constant transformation and search for their place.

Stratskas lives and works in Berlin. Her work focuses mainly on figurative painting and uses the human figure to examine relationships, emotional states and people’s interaction with their surroundings. In recent years, she has exhibited her work in Estonia and Germany.

Rändajad is open at the gallery of St John’s Church in Tallinn until October 15.