Mart Vainre Estonian, b. 1988

Mart Vainre (b. 1988) is an artist and lecturer living and working in Tallinn. He graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts with a BA in Art (Painting, 2011) and an MA in Art (New Media, 2014), and has been teaching since 2014. He currently serves as the head of the MA Contemporary Art programme and visiting associate professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Alongside his hand-executed painting practice, Vainre draws on inputs from 3D scanning and modelling as well as data analysis. Through this, he explores how technology imitates the human — and conversely, how we come to adopt what machines produce. Since 2021, Vainre has been working on the “Paintman” series, whose protagonist is a superhero with the superpower of presenting his paint-body simultaneously in both digital and physical form. It is a project of parallel worlds between the material and its digital twin, through which Vainre imagines, in a techno-psychedelic setting, what mirroring one realm in the other might look like.