Jevgeni Zolotko | “Kunstnikud on kohal” (estonia )

Jevgeni Zolotko (b. 1983) is a freelance artist who lives and works in Tartu. Zolotko’s installations delve into our shared pre-conscious past — a place from which religions and cognitive culture have been shaped over endless millennia. If a narrative or recognizable visual language appears in Zolotko’s works, these function more as tools that help generate impulses to awaken long-forgotten emotions hidden in the amygdala, allowing us to understand what surrounds us through the spine. Zolotko never makes this process easy, and all accompanying textual material is encoded in a cipher whose only method of resolution is interpretation. One can only hope that the signals reaching our limbic system are clear enough to foster empathy with the artist.

He graduated from the sculpture department of the Tartu Higher Art School in 2008 and continued his studies in the sculpture master’s program at the Estonian Academy of Arts in 2010.

Since 2007, Zolotko has worked in various Estonian educational institutions: as a visiting lecturer in the landscape architecture department of Tallinn University of Technology’s Tartu branch; as a lecturer and project manager in the Sculpture and Installation Department of the Estonian Academy of Arts; and as a lecturer and head of the Sculpture Department at the Tartu Higher Art School.

His works have received the following recognition and attention: the Köler Prize of the Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), the A. Starkopf Sculpture Award (2012), the Annual Award of the Endowment for Fine and Applied Arts (2013), a nomination for Tartu Cultural Bearer (2016), and the Akadeemia journal art award (2016).

His works can be found in the Art Museum of Estonia, the Tartu Art Museum, and private collections in Estonia. Over the past five years, Zolotko’s work has been exhibited in Germany, Russia, France, Latvia, and Estonia.