08.03.2025–28.09.2025
As with most of us, travel was an essential part of life for painter and printmaker Karin Luts. It served both as a form of education and creative stimulation, but also as a way of escaping the tedium of everyday life. She often stayed abroad for extended periods of time, which allowed her to immerse herself more deeply in the local milieu. In keeping with tradition, she captured her impressions in sketchbooks and sometimes even on canvas. The artist herself did not consider these travel images as any sort of serious art, likening them more to the work of a photographer, with the only difference being that she did her work by hand. Yet, these numerous works, executed in a variety of media form an important part of her body of work. She chose to depict various places, capturing her most immediate emotions. Her sketches are characterised by a humorous expressiveness, her gouaches by a romantic poise, and her watercolours of southern seas and Venetian canals by a particular delectability. Some sights stuck in the artist’s mind and later became the starting points for the creation of masterpieces.
Karin Luts was born in 1904 in Riidaja, Viljandi County, and died in 1993 in Stockholm. She studied at Pallas Art School, graduating in 1928, going on to become one of the most outstanding Estonian female artists of the early 20th century. In 1944, she fled to Sweden along with her husband, the Slavic philologist Peeter Arumaa.
Karin Luts bequeathed the artworks in her possession in Sweden to the Tartu Art Museum. The first exhibition displaying the artist’s bequest opened in 2004. The current exhibition includes 76 works that are being shown to the public for the first time. Helping to get a deeper insight into Luts’s personality will be the artist’s diaries, both in the form of excerpts as well as some originals, currently housed in the collections of the Estonian Cultural History Archives.
Curator: Mare Joonsalu
Exhibition design and graphic design: Angelika Schneider
