From the Treasury of the Estonian Art Museum

Lepo Mikko (1911-1978), a graduate of the Pallas Art School in 1939, was a confirmed modernist whose vigorous creative stimulus was the atmosphere of spiritual liberation and change of the 1950s and 60s. In those years Mikko painted a number of poetic treatments of country life in the process of renewal, as well as painting landscapes. His most radical artistic searches took form in still lifes, one of the most outstanding examples being Still Life with Mandolin, painted in 1958. In that work, as well as in his other analogous works, the basis is the composition of objects that Mikko set up, in which proportions of form, rhythms of contours and decorative relations between patches of colour, rather than materiality and spaciousness, are of primary importance. One of the most fascinating features in Mikko’s works is the perfectly balanced relationship between abstraction and genuine impression.