Jaan Toomik
1961– · Estonian video artist, painter and filmmaker
Jaan Toomik (born in Tartu, 1961) is an Estonian video artist, painter and filmmaker, widely regarded as the most internationally recognised contemporary artist from Estonia. Trained at the Tallinn art academy, where he studied painting from 1985 to 1991, he first worked in a large-scale Neo-Expressionist style, with paintings such as Menstruation (1989) and Dancer (1990), before moving towards performance, installation and site-specific work.
His international breakthrough came in the 1990s with short, pared-down pieces. Way to São Paulo (1994), shown at the São Paulo Biennial, depicted a cube mirror floating on three rivers in cities that lie along the same geographic line. Dancing Home (1995), presented at ARS '95 in Helsinki, shows the artist dancing on the deck of a ferry to the rhythm of its engines. In 1997 he represented Estonia at the Venice Biennale, and that same year he projected a video onto the back of a truck driving through the night from Tartu to Tallinn.
His best-known work, Father and Son (1998), shows him skating naked across the icy Baltic Sea, accompanied by a religious choral piece sung by his son. His legacy lies in bringing Estonian identity into a global visual language and in blending autobiography with documentary observation. He continues to live in Tallinn, where he has taught at the Estonian Academy of Arts.