The Painter: Merike Estna at the Estonia Pavilion

At the Estonian Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, Merike Estna will spend months painting in public. The work did not arrive finished. Instead, it will accumulate slowly across the duration of the exhibition: layers of revisions, thoughts and pauses on a 22-metre canvas laid across a former church turned community basketball court. 

By the close of the Biennale, the work may become one of the largest paintings produced during this year’s exhibition. But scale is not the project’s central proposition. Time is.

That idea – painting as something durational, contingent on its surroundings and permanently unfinished – has become inseparable from another transformation in Estna’s life: motherhood. The artist, who has two young children and will live in Venice with her family throughout the Biennale, speaks of parenting as something that has fundamentally altered her understanding of artistic production.

“I have a tenth month old and a four year old. And they have taught me both so much," Estna says. "A child is never ready. It’s a person who grows and develops. I think these things affected a lot of my thinking as an artist.”

The exhibition, titled The House of Leaking Sky, is not a conventional national pavilion. Instead, it is a process of maintenance and exposure - painterly, but owing as much, perhaps, to the exposures of photography and the logic of archeology. Visitors find a tiled floor painted with motifs derived from Estonian folk mythology, alongside the evolving central canvas, which Estna will continue working on daily in public view. The pavilion’s curator, Natalia Sielewicz, describes the project as an attempt to “demythologise” both painting and the spectacle of the Biennale itself.

“There might be moments where the paint has to dry,” Sielewicz says. “It will be quite anticlimactic at those moments. But this is also how work in the studio is done.”

A refusal to come to terms with resolution runs throughout Estna’s recent practice. In the exhibition catalogue, the artist describes an earlier work, Ocean, as “a painting that is not meant to be finished but rather to stay in process for the rest of my life”. She continued adding to the work during exhibition closures, allowing viewers only partial access to its evolution. The experience forced her, she writes, “to embrace the moment and the not knowing, to embrace chance and imperfection”.

That language mirrors the vocabulary she now uses to discuss parenthood. Rather than framing motherhood as an interruption to artistic practice, Estna describes it as something that intensified her sense of immediacy and presence. “People say kids suck their energy,” she says. “For me it’s almost the opposite.”

The relationship between artistic production and reproductive labour sits quietly but insistently beneath the pavilion’s structure. Sielewicz, herself a mother, resists reducing the exhibition to a straightforward statement about working parenthood. Yet she argues that the project inevitably exposes the contradictions facing artists expected simultaneously to sustain a practice, maintain visibility and perform care.

“There is this streamlined message in the art world,” she says, “that the work always has to come first, or alternatively that you can achieve everything if you optimise your schedule.” What interests both women instead is “the act of care” itself: how maintaining another life transforms one’s own identity, bodily rhythms and relationship to time.

That idea extends formally into the exhibition. Painting here becomes less an autonomous object than an organism requiring continuous attention. The pavilion’s imagery draws from Estonian folk songs in which creation emerges not through heroic acts but through repetitive domestic labour. One recurring reference, discussed by both artist and curator, involves women “raking the sea”, an act of mundane maintenance that ultimately produces the cosmos itself.

Sielewicz connects these stories to broader histories of women’s labour and artistic exclusion in her catalogue essay, Resisting Closure. Painting as World-Making. There she situates Estna within lineages of women artists whose work was historically constrained by domesticity even as it emerged from it. Figures such as the Bolognese painter Lavinia Fontana – who sustained both an artistic career and a large family – are recognised as important precedents for this body of work.

But Estna’s relationship to those histories is not simply illustrative. Her practice repeatedly destabilises the distinctions between painting and craft and public and domestic space. 

The site itself reinforces the idea. Rather than occupying a pristine pavilion in the Giardini, Estonia’s presentation takes place in a repurposed community building layered with traces of previous uses: basketball hoops suspended beneath frescoed ceilings, children’s murals still visible in the courtyard. In the catalogue, the writer Keiu Krikmann describes the space slowly transforming into an inhabited studio filled with “tiles, endless tiles” and the routines of family life.

The result is an exhibition less concerned with producing a singular masterpiece than with exposing the conditions under which art is actually made: interruptions, repetitions, emotional fatigue, domestic negotiations and ongoing acts of care. 

“Not aiming to show a final product or a masterpiece,” the artist says, “but to show the process in all its ups and downs and better and worse days – like life in general.”