Ülo Sooster

Ülo Sooster (Ühtri, on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa, 1924 – Moscow, 1970) was an Estonian nonconformist painter and a notable figure of unofficial art in the Soviet Union. His career was shaped by Stalinist repression. He trained at the Tartu Art College, where he studied surrealism between 1945 and 1949. In 1949 he was arrested and deported to the Gulag, where he served a ten-year sentence of hard labour at the Karaganda camp.

After his release in 1956, during the Khrushchev Thaw, he moved to Moscow and worked intensively outside official channels. In 1962 he showed Eye in the Egg at the Moscow Manege exhibition, an event that became a setback for the official acceptance of modern art, since Khrushchev angrily rebuked the exhibitors. His work was the subject of a monograph by Ilya Kabakov, who kept it through the Soviet period and published it in 1996, after emigrating to New York. Sooster died in Moscow in 1970.