Liisa Kruusmägi "Yokai Tea Party / 妖怪のお茶"

Draakon gallery 3.–26.07.2025

Liisa Kruusmägi has been painting her thoughts and feelings, featuring people, animals, and the things around her in various environments. The bright colours of her paintings can make us breathe and rest in these anxious times.

This exhibition, which consists of new paintings and ceramics created based on her experiences staying in Japan in 2015 and 2023, began with her interest in the mysterious, weird, creepy, and sometimes humorous creatures that appear in Japanese folklore, known as Yokai, while observing her surroundings and searching for funny, new and strange things. Yokai has been brought into existence through the process of telling and passing on the strange phenomena born from people's fears, anxieties, and mysteries as a shared experience. Kruusmägi is open to different cultures and to such creatures that are beyond human control. Additionally, she does not immediately impose a simple judgment of good and evil on them. Yokai that enter the house through the window, that attend a tea ceremony, that eat ice cream, etc., look cute, humorous and somewhat familiar.

Hirohisa Koike

Liisa Kruusmägi (1988) is an Estonian painter and illustrator. She studied painting as a bachelor at the Estonian Academy of Arts and finished a master’s degree in drawing there in 2013. Kruusmägi has improved herself at the Rhode Island Schools of Design. Her recent solo exhibitions include Cephalopods with Binoculars at Vaal Gallery (2022), Balearic Liisa at Stella Soomlais Studio (2022) and Colours of Corals with Maarja Mäemets at HOP Gallery (2021). Her works can also be seen in the street scene: she has painted large murals on the north side of Paide Pritsumaja and above the entrance of Tops Bar in Tallinn.

Exhibitions at Draakon gallery are supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment, the Estonian Ministry of Culture, and Liviko AS.