Örd and Urb open joint exhibition on places and perception

Estonian painters Liisi Örd and Martin Urb have opened the joint exhibition “Vision. Places” at the Vernissage gallery in Tallinn, ERR reported. The exhibition brings together their differing views of space, nature and people’s relationship with their surroundings.

The exhibition places Örd’s meditative landscapes alongside Urb’s everyday interiors. Although the works initially appear to depict different worlds, they share an interest in how people perceive places and how external and internal spaces influence and complement each other.

In Örd’s paintings, a specific place often becomes part of a larger whole. She moves from the individual towards the universal, presenting nature as a space where people can sense their belonging and experience themselves as part of something greater. Urb approaches place through its story, focusing on the past and present of spaces, traces of time, the spirit of a place and people’s ties to their surroundings and roots.

Light is central to both artists’ work, although it plays different roles. In Urb’s paintings, light enters a room or emerges within it, creating atmosphere and giving depth to the space, objects and people. In Örd’s work, light is inseparable from nature and serves as the basis of growth, existence and perception.

The exhibition also takes on a personal dimension through the artists’ depictions of one another. Örd has portrayed Urb in two paintings as an observer and witness amid northern nature, at once part of the surrounding landscape. Urb, in turn, has painted Örd in an interior, where the figure merges with the silence and atmosphere of the space.

The exhibition thus moves from observing physical places towards the human inner world, asking where the space around us ends and a person’s own space begins.