Many of Siiri Jüris’s paintings are bordered by wooden frames shaped and colored to resemble a goo-like substance. These amorphous frames create the illusion that the kaleidoscopic color fields are seeping from her canvases.
We are excited to present to melt into your soil and sprout as a flower, Siiri Jüris’ second exhibition with the gallery. This presentation features new works, including select paintings from her recent exhibition of the same name at Tütar Gallery in Tallinn, Estonia. This new body of work focuses on coexistence in both the content and medium of her works. Can painting, which has historically been considered a symbol of high culture, exist in symbiosis with the possibilities that artificial intelligence and digital technology provide?
There is nothing unusual in using digital tools in visual art. Their wider use gained momentum in the 1990s when personal computers, graphics software and the internet made digital art more available and enabled artists to experiment with new technologies. Artificial intelligence is not a new discovery, either. Artificial intelligence as a field of study began in the 1950s, but its wider use in creative works has gained momentum in recent years – primarily thanks to the development of generative AI and easily accessible tools. Jüris has said that she started using digital tools and artificial intelligence by asking the question of whether and how they could affect her manual work process. Curiosity led her to conduct her first experiments a few years ago.
One can find bodyscapes, mystical worlds of her own and distorted perspectives in Jüris’s technically professional and eye-catching works. At first glance, it may even be difficult to understand what one is seeing. Her works are intuitively and slowly processed, taking on a life of their own. Surfaces, rhythms and layers emerge from the play of colours. The layers melt into each other, take shape and create shifts. Shifts occur also in the physical state of the works – the canvas melts into a sculptural form and the form flows back into the canvas. The frames of the paintings seem to breathe, absorbing surfaces and shapes, melting and transforming. Some have been made by hand, others modelled using 3D printing.
The title to melt into your soil and sprout as a flower expresses aptly how artificial intelligence and digital tools can merge into traditional painting and sprout from the seed as something completely new. They can be an aid and an experimental tool in the artist’s creative process. A visual dialogue occurs, where traditional and experimental or organic and artificial don’t oppose each other, but merge into a new whole.
— written by Kristlyn Liier
From Artsy.net, written by art critique Maxwell Rabb.
Many of Siiri Jüris’s paintings are bordered by wooden frames shaped and colored to resemble a goo-like substance. These amorphous frames create the illusion that the kaleidoscopic color fields are seeping from her canvases. For instance, you, close to my heart (2025) features one massive canvas with a smaller affixed canvas, each crowned with this distinctive frame. The panels are bursting with swirling color painted across both canvases with energetic brushstrokes. This 3D painting is part of Jüris’s solo show, to melt into your soil and sprout as a flower, at Tütar Gallery in Tallinn, Estonia. Jüris’s paintings are created through a slow layering process, in which acrylic paint is allowed to move freely before drying. This random process allows for unexpected forms and patterns to emerge. Within these abstract, thoughtful works, Jüris often includes hints of figures. Her painting last dance before twilight (2025) seems at first glance to depict a mountainous skyline, but, upon closer inspection, these forms resemble several people dancing arm in arm, and fingers from a grasping hand reaching over.
Siiri Jüris (1992) is an Estonian painter currently living and working in Uppsala, Sweden. She holds a BA and MA in Painting from the University of Tartu (2015, 2017) and an MFA from the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm (2021). Jüris’ work explores themes of emotional communication, care, belonging, and coexistence. Using archival materials and personal memories as a foundation, interwoven with fictional narratives, she creates immersive worlds saturated in color, where figurative and abstract, synthetic and organic, traditional and digital visual languages converge.
Her works have been exhibited at Market Art Fair (Sweden), Tartu Art Museum, Duerr Gallery (Sweden), MO Museum (Lithuania), Vilnius Picture Gallery (Lithuania), as well as Hobusepea and Draakon galleries. She has been a finalist for the Young Painter Prize multiple times (2019, 2021, 2024) and won the Young Tartu competition in 2020. In 2024, she was awarded the Young Artist Encouragement Prize by Tartu Art House. Jüris has also collaborated with scientists to create illustrations published in renowned journals such as Science magazine. Her works are included in the collections of Jönköping and Dalarna Counties in Sweden, as well as the Art Museum of Estonia.
