Katrin Piile received the Malle Leis award
"An artist must paint every day. Only in bad movies do people wait for inspiration."
"Very little good art has been made throughout the ages." - Malle Leis
The heirs of Malle Leisi (1940-2017) has decided to establish a Malle Leis Art Prize. It will be awarded to a female artist who lives and works in Estonia and has dedicated herself to art, spending long hours working both technically and conceptually on work of art. The rules do not require that the artist must necessarily be a painter and/or graphic artist, as Malle Leis was. However, the heirs, having previously consulted with several artists and art scholars, decided to give the first Malle Leis award to Katrin Piile.
Sandra Jõgeva, the daughter of Malle Leis, has written the following about Katrin Piile's exhibition Abstract Hyperreality in the Sirp newspaper on 31 May 2019: “Katrin Piile's approach to the artist's profession is uncompromising, even brutal. Punctually, even meticulously, brutal as contradictory as that may sound. /---/ But all this wouldn't matter as much if the result of those hours of work, i.e. an expression of an old-school artist's lifestyle, wasn't so impressive. Katrin Piile has thereby stepped aside from the path that has defined to to date: no longer does hyper-realistic figurativeness and a relationship to pop culture play a role in her work. With the same dedication, Katrin Piile now depicts something as common and everyday for a painter as a palette on her canvases. A relief of the oil paint, which has dried into clumps forming picturesque surfaces with each other, is painted in an enlarged form onto the canvas, this with elaborate, ‘invisible’ brushwork and illusion creation. A bit of self-irony and self-affirmation, all in one.”
Katrin Piile was born in 1987. She graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts as a painter
in 2010. and had been in shows for years before that. Katrin Piile's paintings and drawings are characterised by a picturesque and emotional hyperrealism, precise details, a large work volume and specific sense of drama that can be associated with the impacts of comic book culture.
The material part of Malle Leis Award consists of the artist's work and recompense. This time
the monetary value of the prize is €682. The presentation of the Malle Leis Award may become a regular event, but this will not occur more often than once every five years. The presentation took place on July 9th, the artist's 80th birthday at the Malle Leis exhibition Eternal Summer in the Tallinn Portrait Gallery at 2 Suur-Karja St.
Sincere thanks to: Rene Kirspuu/Tallinn Portrait Gallery and the Estonian Authors´ Society
Press release compiled by:
Sandra Jõgeva and Henrik Jõgeva in Tallinn,
10. June 2020