Tallinn – Fotografiska Tallinn (Shepard Fairey)

I feel like I’ve only just finished writing up my last little adventure in Tallinn with Steve, Bev, Ross and Susanna. Anyway, I’m back in the city but on my own this time and that’s an opportunity to work through all the places that we didn’t have time to visit before. I received a discount of 20% off for filling in a survey about the Tallinn Card and so I’ve bought another one as they do represent decent value for money, so that’s three days of museums and galleries coming up.

There are two floors of exhibitions and they change every few months, so there’s no permanent exhibition here. I didn’t check in advance what was on display, but the first exhibition was from Shepard Fairey who I confess that I haven’t heard of. I’m not really very artistic, but new perspectives and all that.

I do though know one of the most important images of the Obama campaign and this was one of Fairey’s works.

If only. Just verging into politics for one moment, I looked at the on-line news edition of a couple of Estonian newspapers and I think I was surprised that there was nothing about the Trump administration, it was very focused on the Russian threat and other national and European news. All somewhat different from the UK news at the moment.

One in the “these sunsets are to die for” series by Fairey. It’s based around the old Soviet propaganda posters and uses a rather dark humour to bring awareness to pollution damaging the landscapes. The punchy message might be that pollution needs to be stopped and quickly, but there’s another one which is more that the environment is so damaged that it’s best to enjoy what we can now if it’s all going up in flames.

A beautiful ocean scene, with an oil rig.

There’s a lot of artworks with bold imagery going on.

The OBEY series is one of Fairey’s longest running themes, about questioning norms.

Fairey is American, but I can see why these Russian style images have a resonance in Estonia.

This wasn’t the best attended art exhibition that I’ve ever been to, but I rather liked it as it had a political edge which gives some meaning to arrangements. There were some documentaries playing about Fairey’s work, but they didn’t tackle his little issues with copyright over recent years and I only discovered that from subsequent reading up on him.