Across The Baltic Sea

Across the Baltic Sea – Estonian Art in Dialogue with Sweden

Across the Baltic Sea flow not only waterways, but also stories, destinies, and artistic impulses. The auction Across the Baltic Sea highlights the profound relationship between Estonia and Sweden, through artists whose works reflect both flight and belonging, exile and rootedness.

When Estonia fell under Soviet rule in the 1940s, several artists chose to leave their homeland. Sweden became the refuge of figures such as Endel Köks, Erik Haamer, and Karin Luts. These artists built bridges between two art scenes – shaped as much by Baltic sensibility as by Nordic light. Others, like Richard Uutmaa, chose to remain and continue their artistic practice under entirely different conditions. Today, their respective works represent two intertwined strands in Estonian art history: the outer and the inner, the free and the compressed.

Within the auction runs a particular line from the pioneer Kristjan Raud – whose expressive drawings at the turn of the century laid the foundation for a visual world rooted in folklore and myth – to contemporary voices such as Philip A. Luik, whose visual language carries both the weight of history and the movement of the present. This line holds a century of change, but also an unbroken belief in the image’s power to transcend borders.

Alongside the Estonian works, the spotlight also turns to Lithuania and photographer Antanas Sutkus, who with rare sensitivity captured the silences of everyday life and the inner movements of people within the Soviet reality. In works such as Country Street, 1 and Marathon at University Street, Vilnius, we encounter the same existential presence and visual gravity that mark the Baltic painters – but in a quiet black-and-white language where time and gaze seem to pause together.

Across the Baltic Sea is not merely a geographical title, but an artistic condition – a movement between home and exile, tradition and renewal, between three cultures that have always been closer to one another than the map suggests.