A new supermarket will soon be built on the former site of the Rahu Cinema in Kopli. Fortunately, the 74 square metre fresco panel by Dolores Hoffmann in the former cinema was not fully destroyed together with the building.
The monumental painting completed in 1963 as part of her graduation project at the State Art Institute was largely removed from the wall of the cinema lobby, and more than 30 pieces of the fresco are currently “planted” inside the life-size video projection in the exhibition at the EKA Gallery to once again create the illusion of the painting as a whole and its exceptional scale.
Parts of the giant fresco have now become panel paintings surrounded by iron frames, which will begin a new life after the exhibition. With such a detour, nine fragments have now returned to their source at the EAA Museum, whose main goal is to collect and store students’ graduation projects. The museum’s collection has been supplemented with several portraits from the fresco. The prototypes of the characters depicted on the mural included Jüri Palm, Evi Sepp and fishermen from Sõrve Peninsula in Saaremaa, as well as Ernest Hemingway, an idol of young people at the time. After the exhibition, some fragments will find their way to the public areas of the EKA building, while others will be preserved in the museum’s storage facility.
The fresco was removed from its original location by the EKA’s Department of Cultural Heritage and Conservation, led by Hilkka Hiiop, who prevented the former graduation project at the Department of Painting from becoming construction waste and, instead, gave new life to its fragments.