Olev Subbi: Striving for Perfection
The exhibition Olev Subbi: Striving for Perfection is open in the Estonian National Museum from 22 March to 12 October 2025Olev Subbi’s (1930–2013) survey exhibition provides a comprehensive insight into the oeuvre of one of the most remarkable painters in Estonian art in the second half of the 20th century. The exhibition that covers all his major creative periods and genres features more than 70 paintings from national and private collections: memory landscapes, nudes, portraits, figural compositions and abstract works. The exhibition celebrates the 95th anniversary of Olev Subbi’s birth.
Olev Subbi’s creative career lasted half a century. Having yearned to become an artist from a very early age, Subbi began his art studies at the State Art Institute in the 1940s, but was deported to Siberia only half a year later. He spent eight years in Siberia, and resumed his art studies immediately after his return. Subbi’s first exhibitions took place in the 1960s, and he was creatively active for the next half a century. Quite quickly, his art gained recognition outside Estonia, too: several of his paintings belong to museums in Russia and to private collections all over Europe and even farther.
According to Olev Subbi, his painting principles remained the same from the beginning to the end: he followed the Pallas Art School traditions of painting, where colour was the first priority. Subbi was known for his labour-intensive and layered manner of painting, in which various subtle surfaces of paint applied in dense brushstrokes blended into each other, overlapped and intertwined. Quite early on, Subbi became interested in the question of whether colour had to depict anything at all and to what extent it could be independent. Therefore, it is only logical that by the 1980s he arrived at abstract painting, where colours existed in different abstract forms.
In addition to the intrinsic values of painting Subbi was also interested in issues related to memory, beauty and space. His early works often feature objects that refer to his childhood in the 1930s: items of furniture or farming tools from that period were symbols of an ideal world, for which Subbi yearned throughout his oeuvre. His works have also been regarded as a parallel world under construction, in which he strives for absolute beauty and harmony. This aspiration was also evident in Subbi’s nudes: instead of conveying eroticism, they were yet another means of creating an idealised parallel world.
Olev Subbi’s paintings were based on associations and fragments of memory. In his paintings, images and atmospheres derived from different impressions and experiences blend and move away from everyday reality. In the Soviet context, Subbi’s oeuvre can therefore be regarded as a way of looking for something that real life did not provide.
The exhibition also features stands with biographical data on Olev Subbi and is accompanied by a catalogue and the artist’s biography book.
Curator: Eero Epner
Designer: Mari Kurismaa
Graphic designer: Mari Kaljuste
Signature work of the exhibition: White House. 1972. Tempera and oil on hardboard. 90 x 121 cm. Art Museum of Estonia