Olga Terri: A Portrait of an Artist

Olga Terri (1916 – 2011) was an Estonian artist who studied graphics at the State School of Arts and Crafts and painting at the Tallinn School of Fine and Applied Arts from 1943-1944, where her teacher was Erik Haamer. The main focus of her work was portraiture, with landscape occasionally emerging as an equal partner. Terri’s emotional range leans towards stark poetry. Immediately after World War II, Olga Terri was one of the few artists who disregarded official ideology and the creation of socialist realist illusions of happiness, instead expressing the anguish, fear, and humiliation of a time of suffering in her paintings.