Konrad Mägi

“Happiness is not for us poor sons of the earth. For us, art is the only way out, since at the moment when the soul is filled with the eternal suffering of life, art opens up to us what life is not capable of.” This is how Konrad Mägi writes in December of 1907, the dampest month in Paris, with fog and dampness forcing their way in through the windows.

Konrad Mägi’s biography provides an overview of the artist’s life and creative work in a narrative style, offering a broader insight into Estonian cultural life as a whole at the outset of the 20^th century. The biography includes Konrad Mägi’s biographical photographs and dozens of reproductions of paintings. Konrad Mägi (1878-1925) was one of the first Estonian modernist painters, with extraordinary visions of nature and powerful colours at the heart of his creative work.

“There are two ways for how art could incorporate life. The convenient way is the road of reason. The steep road that leads over chasms – that is the road of the soul, for which life is deep sleep and an agonising presentiment of different kinds of relationships, different kinds of profundities than the ones that our pitiable reason can penetrate.”

This biography was published in Estonian, English and Italian in parallel to celebrate the holding of Konrad Mägi’s great solo exhibition in Rome at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (the exhibition is open from 10 October 2017 to 28 January 2018). In 2018 the biography was translated into French and Finnish and in 2022 into Norwegian.