Jaan Toomik (born 2 October 1961 in Tartu) is an Estonian video artist, painter and award-winning filmmaker, often described as the most widely acknowledged Estonian contemporary artist on the international scene. Status In the Estonian art world Toomik received recognition as a painter from the late 1980s and from the early 1990s as an installation and video artist. The critics often refer to him internationally as the most well-known contemporary artist from Estonia mainly due to his short video works that have received wide international acclaim (e.g. Father and Son, 1998). He has participated at the São Paulo Biennale (1994), ARS ‘95 (1995), Manifesta 1 (1996), Venice Biennale (1997; 2003), 4th berlin biennial of contemporary art (2006), etc. Currently he is represented by Temnikova & Kasela Gallery. Biography and art Jaan Toomik was born on October 2, 1961 in Tartu, Estonia (then: Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic). His father died in 1971, when he was 9 years old, leaving him and his older brother to the care of their mother who was a doctor. Toomik remembers that some time in his late puberty, he became a highly sensitive young man, only taking an interest in philosophy and the beautiful arts. After graduating from secondary school in Haapsalu town in 1980, he joined the Soviet army for two years, as every male citizen of the Estonian SSR back then had to. From 1981 to 1983 he served his military service near Volgograd in Russia, guarding a huge bomb warehouse and loading ammunition onto the trains bound for Afghanistan, but also drawing dozens and dozens of portraits of his fellow soldiers. Shortly after his army experience, Toomik enrolled in the art academy in Tallinn, where between 1985 and 1991 he studied in the faculty of painting. Some large-scale paintings with openly Neo-Expressionist brushwork have survived from that time (e.g. Menstruation, 1989; Dancer, 1990). The artist described himself as being heavily influenced by Jorge Luis Borges in those days: “the perception of identity was different during the Soviet era. /…/ We all lived in some other world. Even geographically we transferred ourselves somewhere else. /…/ However, during the Singing Revolution (1988) you started to identify with this land and nation.” A good example could be Toomik's temporal installation Bed 75 (1993), located in the centre of Tallinn for one month, which consisted of 75 iron beds, bought by the artist from the Russian military