Nerva (artist)
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Nerva is a graphic artist, currently living in Tartu, Estonia. He currently works in the giclee style, although early in his career he completed around 100 acrylic paintings. Nerva's other products include two books of art, several calenders, and a popular range of notecards. Nerva's paintings have been displayed in personal exhibitions in Estonia, Latvia and Finland. Several thousand works have been exported to dozens of countries and all inhabited continents.
[edit] About Nerva
Nerva was born on Sept. 16, 1972, in Karilatsi (a small village in South Estonia). His mother was a textile artist, and his sister a fashion designer. Nerva was trained as a composer, and has released an album of original music. His career as an artist began in 1998; the breakthrough came in 2002, when his giclee works began to receive major recognition in Estonia, resulting in dozens of personal exhibitions around the country and abroad.
Nerva currently lives in Tartu, Estonia, with his wife and three children. He is working full time as an artist, as well as pursuing side projects such as interior design (including the offices of several IT companies in Tartu) and website design. Although 'Nerva' is in fact his legal last name, he prefers to be known by it alone professionally.
[edit] Nerva's Works
While Nerva's early, acrylic paintings were unique, his recent works completed in giclee have relatively large runs, usually between 25 and 250 copies of each work. Every copy is individually signed and numbered, and is thus still considered an item of art. Although most works are fairly large in size, Nerva also has a line of minigraphics, including both original designs and resized versions of some large-scale paintings. The range of postcards, mostly distributed through the Estonian national postal agency's retail outlets, feature fragments of popular artworks.
Nerva's first book, Sense of the Sun/Päikese Puudutus (ISBN: 9949101433) came out in 2003. It was bilingual, in English and Estonian, and consisted of high-quality reproductions of Nerva artworks accompanied by fairytale-style short stories, commenting on the picture or explaining its background. These were expanded versions of the comments hosted for the same picture on Nerva's website, and displayed as captions during the Sense of the Sun exhibition tour, which took place in the summer of 2003.
[edit] Nerva Art Chamber
While Nerva's works have been used to decorate several venues around Estonia, the largest permanent exhibition of Nerva art can be found at the Nerva Art Chamber (Nerva Kunstikamber), a gallery and shop just outside the medieval town center of Tartu. This occupies half of the ground floor of a small wooden building; although it is permanently staffed and sells all types of Nerva products, it has been designed as a cozy, domestic hangout, where locals and visitors can always stop by for a cup of coffee, or occasionally a glass of wine.
