Merike Estna and the rare spectacle of a painting being born in public

At Venice, where national pavilions usually prefer their art neatly completed and safely hung, Merike Estna chose the less convenient route: she made the work in front of people. Over five months inside the Estonian pavilion, she built The House of Leaking Sky into 22 large canvases, while the exhibition space also gathered a 26-metre bench and a floor of 25,000 tiles. Estna described that floor as a kind of mind map for the project, which is about as close as contemporary art gets to admitting that structure matters.

The point was not to hide the process and polish the result later. The process was the result. Estna began with an empty canvas and kept working in public, day after day, while visitors came and went. Maria Arusoo, commissioner of the Estonian pavilion, said the space had become a living place and that many people returned to talk, sit and ask questions. Estna, for her part, said visitors were not intruders and that the work only truly carries when people are there to see how it is born.

That openness fits the subject matter. Motherhood and female art history sit at the centre of the project, and the personal dimension is hard to miss: Estna had recently given birth and was still on maternity leave when she prepared what she called the biggest project of her career. She lived in Venice with her family throughout the Biennale, and the city proved, predictably, less than ideal for domestic calm. Her older child lost a scooter in a canal on the first morning, and the youngest had only learned to walk a couple of months earlier. Venice can be beautiful, yes, but it also has a habit of turning ordinary family life into a small obstacle course.

Curator Natalia Sielewicz frames the exhibition as a meditation on motherhood and on the lineages of women artists who fought for artistic self-determination. In her text, she refers to pittore senza opera, the painter without works, a figure often associated with women whose work was absorbed into patriarchal workshops or erased from official chronicles. She also points to Marietta Robusti Tintoretta, who worked beside her father, Jacopo Tintoretto, had her paintings circulate without her name, and died in childbirth before she could fully claim her authorship.

The setting matters too. Estna worked in the former Church of Santa Maria Assunta in Venice’s Castello district, a place that later served as a community space and gymnasium. Those layers of sacred, civic and everyday use formed the backdrop to an installation that kept changing over time. At first she was anxious about painting in front of visitors, but later the arrangement reminded her of art academy days, when she shared a studio and tried to focus while others chatted around her.

Politics, naturally, found its way into the Biennale as well. The 61st Venice Art Biennale opened amid protests over the organiser’s decision to invite Russia to open its pavilion in the Giardini, one of the event’s two main sites. Arusoo said art cannot be separated from politics, and recalled Estna’s view that Estonia had been absent from the Biennale for 60 years because it was occupied and could not participate as an independent country. Estna also signed an open letter against the Israeli pavilion.

The exhibition runs until 22 November 2026. By then, the arguments around it will have moved on, as they always do. The canvases will not.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com