Nothing Blooms Always –
After Still Life
Tutar gallery, Tallinn, Estonia
Sep 11 - Oct 19, 2025
Exhibition text: Andreas Trossek
Graphic design: Ott Metusala
Photos: Alana Proosa and Katrin Piile
Katrin Piile’s finely honed and exceptionally precise language of painting is mostly based on photographic imagery and a composition of form and colour abstracted or dislocated to serve a conceptual purpose.
The genre of her latest series of works can be classified as still-life, with cut flowers thrown in a bin. As in stilleven – the symbolic and allegorical still-lifes that flourished in the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries – we can read in the artist’s choice of motifs a critical commentary on today’s global consumer society. Nothing says more about us than the litter we leave behind: things we once valued and fought tooth and claw to obtain, only then to seemingly change our minds and throw them away.
Here then are these still-lifes, these wilting flowers in a black plastic bucket, so symbolic of impermanence. This new series of works was painted on a circular canvas, a rarely used medium which has been known as the tondo form since the Renaissance. In classical architecture, tondi tend to be given a fixed place in a room, but these paintings can be very effectively exhibited on both wall and floor surfaces.
Piile’s paintings are a fine example of decoy images, a truly familiar trompe l’oeil on a two-dimensional canvas surface – a momentary sensation when an optically recognisable image suddenly becomes three-dimensional in the brain, with space and image becoming one. As observers, we instinctively believe that what we are seeing is true, even when our minds tell us that it cannot be. Although trompe l’oeil only entered the vernacular as a word denoting a skill in the 19th century, artists have been striving to achieve its delightful effect since the dawn of time.
If Piile is cultivating super- or hyper-realism, the use of superlatives is fully justified. If, however, she is exploring a more generalized conceptual photorealism, her work engages in dialogue with the enduring traditions of painting.