Olev Subbi: Striving for Perfection

Olev Subbi’s (1930–2013) creative career lasted half a century. Having yearned to become an artist from a very early age, Subbi began his art studies at the State Art Institute in the 1940s, but was deported to Siberia only half a year later. He spent eight years in Siberia, and resumed his art studies immediately after his return. Subbi’s first exhibitions took place in the 1960s, and quite quickly, his art gained recognition outside Estonia, too: there are more than 70 works by Olev Subbi in numerous private collections in Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the USA, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Japan and Canada.

According to Olev Subbi, his painting principles remained the same from the beginning to the end: he followed the Pallas Art School traditions of painting, where colour was the first priority. Subbi was known for his labour-intensive and layered manner of painting, in which various subtle surfaces of paint applied in dense brushstrokes blended into each other, overlapped and intertwined.

In addition to the intrinsic values of painting Subbi was also interested in issues related to memory, beauty and space. His early works often feature objects that refer to his childhood in the 1930s: items of furniture or farming tools from that period were symbols of an ideal world, for which Subbi yearned throughout his oeuvre. His works have also been regarded as a parallel world under construction, in which he strives for absolute beauty and harmony. This aspiration was also evident in Subbi’s nudes: instead of conveying eroticism, they were yet another means of creating an idealised parallel world.

In 2025 the 95^th anniversary of Olev Subbi’s birth is being celebrated in the Estonian National Museum with the exhibition Olev Subbi: Striving for Perfection. This catalogue features large reproductions of all the works included in the exhibition.

In his essay, the curator of the exhibition Eero Epner has examined the intrinsic values of Olev Subbi’s paintings and focussed primarily on the colour and composition of the works, also touching upon the artist’s preferences for objects and plots. The ethnologist Anu Kannike, a senior researcher at the Estonian National Museum, describes the connections between objects and memory and the memory anchors, i.e. the most meaningful objects and activities for Estonians.