Avo Keerend

Avo Keerend studied at Estonian Academy of Arts. The recorded working language is Estonian. Work by Avo Keerend is recorded in the collections of Art Museum of Estonia and Huis van het boek. Distinctions recorded are Order of the White Star, 4th Class, People's Artist of the Estonian SSR and Kristjan Raud Prize.

• Name — Avo Keerend • Born — 18 December 1920 • Birthplace — Tallinn, Estonia • Died — 5 June 2012 • Citizenship — Estonian • Education — State Industrial Art School in Tallinn; Tartu State Art Institute • Occupation — Printmaker, painter, illustrator • Known for — Linocut, book illustration, geometric abstraction • Awards — Kristjan Raud Art Award (1987) Eduard Wiiralt Art Award (2001) Order of the White Star, 4th Class (2011)

Keerend was born in Tallinn on 18 December 1920. He studied graphic art at the State Industrial Art School in Tallinn from 1936 to 1940 and later continued at the wartime successor of that institution, where he studied painting under Eerik Haamer. In 1943 he studied at a drawing studio for war correspondents in Berlin. During World War II, Keerend worked as a combat artist. After spending 1945 to 1946 as a prisoner of war in Czechoslovakia, he resumed his studies in Tallinn and Tartu, graduating from the Tartu State Art Institute in 1949 with a specialisation in painting. He went on to build a long exhibition career in Estonia and abroad. According to the Art Museum of Estonia's digital collection and EKABL, he held solo exhibitions in venues including Tallinn Art Hall Gallery, Rakvere Museum, the National Library of Estonia, Gallery G, the Bank of Estonia Gallery and Vabaduse Gallery, while also participating in major group exhibitions such as the Ljubljana Biennale of Graphic Arts in 1973 and exhibitions in Sweden in 2001. Keerend was married to the art historian Leili Keerend, who helped systematise and preserve his oeuvre. He died on 5 June 2012 at the age of 91.

Keerend's work ranged from early figurative and still-life based graphic art to later abstract and geometric compositions. Art-historical scholarship places part of his 1960s graphic work within the Estonian reception of the so-called "severe style", noting that Keerend was among the artists who continued to use aspects of that idiom into the 1970s. The Art Museum of Estonia has identified Keerend as one of the artists who helped introduce powerful colour and geometric form into Soviet-era Estonian graphic art. By the mid-1960s he was experimenting with multicoloured decorative forms in linocut and plastic cut, initially showing biomorphic and figural compositions before moving toward fully abstract work. His 1969 linocut series Stereoscopic Forms became the basis for later modernist prints, and his geometric works of the 1970s have been connected by museum curators to the legacy of international modernism—especially Paul Klee and Joan Miró—as well as to Estonian cubist and constructivist tendencies of the 1920s. Alongside free graphic art, Keerend also worked extensively in book illustration and ex libris. EKABL records joint exhibitions of book graphics and bookplates by Keerend and Vive Tolli in 1970, while library and archive records document works such as Leili ja Avo Keerend ex libris (1968) and his illustrations for August Jakobson's Üheksa jutustust (1979). A 1992 ERR television programme on Estonian contemporary art was devoted to his abstract and geometric work, with commentary by the art critic Sirje Helme.