About

In The House of Leaking Sky, Merike Estna transforms the exhibition space into an open studio, where painting becomes an event rather than an object. Over the course of the biennale, a canvas slowly awakens before the public, as the artist attempts to dissolve the boundaries between art and preservation, the elevated and the everyday.

At the heart of the project hovers the pittore senza opera (“painter without works”), a fate that haunted many early women artists who were erased from historical record. Estna begins with a blank canvas; colour seeps in gradually, pigments leak, edges blur, and gestures wander into performance, routine, and shared spaces. During the process, Estna has been living in Venice with her family, entwining the labour of the mother with the labour of the artist, this revealing creation as repetition—an ongoing act of care and sustained commitment, rather than a single heroic act.

The House of Leaking Sky offers an understanding of painting as a porous practice rooted in intuition, where studio and home, myth and daily labour intertwine. Here, painting becomes both world-making and world-holding, kept alive through the rhythms that sustain life itself. Estna’s performative gestures are heightened by the venue—a former church turned community center— where a frescoed ceiling looks down onto a floor marked with basketball lines, obscured by a painting on tiles offering the many myths and symbols which form Estna’s visual atlas. Sacred and civic, private and public, fold into one another.

Throughout her practice, Merike Estna (b. 1980, lives and works in Tallinn, Estonia and Mexico City, Mexico) has continually imagined painting as something that might bleed beyond its formal boundaries, remain unfinished, or require ongoing care. Estna blurs the historical boundaries between what has traditionally been defined as “high art”—oil on canvas, easel painting, artistic autonomy—and what has been relegated to “craft”, such as textiles, ceramics, embroidery, and domestic or functional objects.

The exhibition will host The School of Strange Weather from 11 to 16 August. During this period, Estna will offer the pavilion as an open-ended experimental platform for Contemporary Art MA students from the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she has been a professor since August 2025.