Merike Estna creates new exhibition live at Venice Biennale

At the Venice Biennale, Estonian artist Merike Estna has been creating her latest exhibition, ‘The House of Leaking Sky’, in public view over the course of five months. The exhibition consists of 22 large canvases, a 26-meter long bench, and a floor composed of 25,000 tiles that Estna describes as a ‘mental map’ of the project.

The work explores themes of maternity and the history of women in art. Estna, who recently returned from maternity leave, incorporates iconographies of care, lineage, and heritage into her practice. Curator Natalia Sielewicz notes that the project reflects on the self-determination of female artists and addresses the concept of the ‘painter without a work’—women whose artistic contributions were historically absorbed by patriarchal workshops or erased from official records, such as the Venetian painter Marietta Robusti Tintoretta.