Ingmar Jerve
, Estonia
Ingmar Jerve (also known as GUTFACE) is an artist from eastern Estonia. He got his first major influence in art at the age of six, watching his father tattoo people in the family kitchen with homemade tattoo machines. As a teenager, he became involved in the local street culture through skateboarding and later BMX, tagging and graffiti. More than ten years later, he lives in Tartu and tries his luck as a self-employed artist, illustrator and graphic designer. In recent years, he has toured Europe with the Stencibility exhibition at the street art festival “Hello Mister Police Officer” and in April 2024 held his first solo exhibition “STREET GNOMES” at the Circus Network gallery in Porto, Portugal.
The works of Ingmāras Jerves arise in a dialogue between the legacy of the imposing Soviet monumental art and the temporary radicalism characteristic of street art. Jerve uses the metal relief technique in reference to the visual language of Soviet-era public art, which emphasized the grandeur of work, solidarity, and historical narratives. Often realized as decorations on the facades of public buildings, this art form aimed to impose ideology and command submission rather than to encourage dialogue. Jerves adopts and reproduces these forms with characteristic irony: as a street artist, he recreates a historically charged medium associated with state power and uses it to challenge and subvert historically relevant connotations. His works do not seek to preserve memory, but to stimulate critical reflection on how contemporary society interacts with public space, as well as on the power structures and values that these buildings embody.
