Yard with an old Car

This painting from the last year of the 1970s testifies to a shift in Olev Subbi’s oeuvre towards greater abstraction. As far as motifs are concerned, Subbi’s works from that decade often contain references to the past via different memory objects: in this particular painting we can see a pump well and an old-fashioned car, neither of which were in everyday use in the 1970s. For Subbi such memory objects had a sentimental and a political dimension. On the one hand, they enabled him to return to his childhood in the 1930s, when he spent idyllic summers on a big farm near Puhja. This came to a dramatic end in the early 1940s, when the farm was destroyed and a number of the Subbi family members were either arrested, killed or forced to flee. On the other hand, painting items dating from the period of the Republic of Estonia was a political statement in the Soviet times, and Subbi turned this into a programmatic activity by repeatedly painting such items.

The level of abstraction in this painting is also greater than before: forms have lost their concreteness and have been replaced by patches of colour that blend into one another in a Subbiesquely layered manner. By virtue of his fine-tuned approach to colour Subbi has elaborated every square centimetre of the painting so that even small sections of it can be viewed as separate paintings. 

The same composition principle used here can be found in several other paintings, too: the right side of the painting is rendered in colder shades, the left side in warmer shades, and a perceived vertical borderline runs between these two fields, separating and uniting zones that are emotionally differently charged.