Avo Keerend

Avo Keerend (18 December 1920 – 5 June 2012) was an Estonian printmaker, painter and illustrator. He was known in post-war Estonian graphic art especially for his linocuts, book illustration, ex libris work, and later geometric-abstractionist prints.

Life and career 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.

Work 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. 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.

Honours and legacy Keerend received the Kristjan Raud Art Award in 1987, became an honorary member of the Estonian Artists' Association in 2000, won the Eduard Wiiralt Art Award in 2001, and was awarded the Order of the White Star, 4th Class, in 2011. In the same year, the Association of Estonian Free Graphic Artists named him Graphic Artist of the Year for his jubilee exhibition Avo Keerend 90 at Vabaduse Gallery.

After his death, the Kumu Art Museum presented the exhibition Avo Keerend and Evi Tihemets. Colour in Estonian Graphic Art (2012–2013), situating Keerend's work within the emergence of pure colour and geometric form in Estonian graphic art of the 1960s and 1970s. His works are held in the collection of the Art Museum of Estonia.

Selected illustrated books Tragöödiaid by Christopher Marlowe (designer and illustrator, 1983) Üheksa jutustust by August Jakobson (illustrator, 1979)