Angela Maasalu

Angela Maasalu is a London-based Estonian artist whose solo exhibition ‘A Fool with a Heart of Glass’ was just on display at Tartu Art House.

In the many chambers of Angela’s palace of fools live creatures that hide their faces behind masks; false tears trickling from the back of their heads, a fragile character stuck between the talons barely breathing, a woman floating, somewhere between melting and drowning, wading into the distance, a resigned body stretched out on a tennis court, a lion watching over sleepers, ghostly figures with a feverish glow, insubstantial contourless horizons, amphibian reptiles, monkeys, scorpions, and many others. Mutants that have stepped out of the canvas of life, and are now wandering around in the maze of the absurdity of the world. The characters in ‘A Fool with a Heart of Glass’ are perplexed by the surrounding world, apathetically gazing into the distant unknown. Contemplating individualistic behaviour, they feel trapped against the backdrop of decline. They are accompanied by the bitter smog of tragic misanthropes. Maasalu’s practice stems from autobiographical episodes, but she translates it into symbolic and poetic imagery in order to expand her personal experience to a more widely read and societal level.