Sirje Petersen (Protsin) is a painter and art art educator. She started her artist career with figurative and abstract paintings in 1980s and has become one of the significant painters in Estonian art.
Petersen has held more than 65 personal exhibitions, including in last Haus Gallery (2026), Tartu Art House Large Gallery (2025), Dragon Gallery (2022), Haus Gallery (2021), Toompea Castle Art Hall- Parliament of the Republic of Estonia (2020), Pärnu City Gallery in Artists House (2019), University of Tartu The Institute of Social Studies (2018), Gallery Noorus, Tartu (2017), The European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) Bruxelles, Belgium (2011), Estonian Embassy in Belgium and Luxembourg, Brussels (2010), Dragon Gallery, Tallinn (2003 and 2009), Tartu Art House (2009), Gallery Becker Jyväskyla, Finland (1995), Tartu Art Hall (1994), in Stockholm, in Riga etc.
Her works belong to the art collections of the Tartu Art Museum, Museum of Tartu University, Estonian Art Fund, Supreme Court of Estonia, Tartu, The Museum of New Art in Pärnu, Lüneburg City Art Collection, Germany, IBL State Art gallery, Port-Louis, Mauritius and etc.
Private collections in Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Lichtenstein, Germany, Italy, Emirate of Abu Dhabi, Philippines and many other collections around the world.
Petersen is a member of Estonian Artists’ Association, Estonian Painters’ Association and Tartu Artists’ Union. Since 2000 she is Associate Professor of Painting at Pallas University of Applied Sciences.
Awards
Kristjan Raud Prize nomination 2021
Konrad Mägi Annual Painting Prize nomination 2021, 2022
Estonian Artists Association Annual Exhibition Public Choice Award 2019
Artists statement
Society has entered a phase of collective hypnotized insanity – war, resistance, anguish, surrender, indifference…
How do we decide to shape the lives of ourselves and future generations, whether greedy and manipulative for ego purposes, or towards a society based on higher ethics, mutual respect and love.
I deal with topics that speak to the deepest layers of human nature. These paintings are metaphors for time, history and personal emotional experience.
Whatever it says to the viewer, it’s the right message because there isn’t such a thing as a wrong and a right message.
My process of work has always been grounded in pleasure and aesthetics and I am not a bit ashamed of it. This belief guides me towards creating compositions that invite and allow the viewer to investigate its surface, its purpose, and its inner feelings.
The past, the present and the future have been intertwined.
This is a spiritual, autobiographical memory where I perceive my subjective time.
The human body and color often help me visualize the thought, perception, questions – not knowing, if these will be answered.
To be outside time, to escape time’s requirements – where from? where to? where? – I feel the curiosity and urge to exit myself, to express and share…
I am my own tempting research object. How not to drop myself or let myself be dissolved?
To accept myself the way I discover myself at a given moment.
News
11/11/2026
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.