Sirje Petersen. Impulses and Gaps

8 May – 30 June 2026
Haus Gallery, Tallinn

Sirje Petersen’s paintings set a rhythm for how we look and move through the two floors of Haus Gallery. Abstracted figures and landscapes give shape to moods and states of mind.

The psychologically charged fields of Petersen’s paintings draw the viewer into a space alive with tension. Figures reach out from the canvas towards the world, lending the compositions an inner tension of their own.

In Petersen’s paintings, impulses and gaps unfold over time. Movement and stillness, the flow of breathing and the intake of a single breath, accompany the act of looking inward and outward. In this way, Petersen makes visible the conversation between our inner lives and the world around us.

Throughout the exhibition, large-scale paintings alternate with miniatures. These shifts in scale give the exhibition the rhythm of a performance. Tension builds, peaks and subsides before gathering again.

The artist writes about the exhibition:

Impulses are moments of force that pass through the body and leave a temporary trace. Gaps are interruptions where continuity fails to take hold. They are places where form breaks down, loses its hold or drops out. The figures do not simply exist here. They happen, constantly changing as they bend, shift and negotiate with gravity. Each movement is both an act of creation and a dissolving. Moving towards something is a process of repeated interruptions and new beginnings, with no final resolution. My exhibition is about how life moves through impulses that carry us forward and interruptions that break the flow.

The intensity of Petersen’s paintings comes from the way colour flows. Hints of the familiar emerge in tones where feelings gather and then disperse at the edge of abstraction. As shapes and patches of colour interact, their meanings remain open. The works invite viewers to attend to their own presence here and now, in a space where anything can emerge, disappear and return.