Kondas Centre of Naïve Art

The Kondas Centre is the only art institution devoted exclusively to outsider art in Estonia. The centre was founded motivated by the desire to introduce the unkown naive symbolist paintings by schoolteacher Paul Kondas (1900-1985) to the wider public.

In addition to the permanent exhibition consisting of 26 paintings by Paul Kondas, the centre hosts about 20 temporary art exhibitions by professional and amateur artists in a year. The main focus of the Kondas Centre is the research, collection and presentation of Estonian outsider art.

The centre organises various cultural events and offers art education activities for grown-ups and children all the year round.

Since 2004, the Kondas Centre has studied the unique artistic expression of self-taught artists in Estonia, talked to them, if possible, and archived the material collected during fieldwork. In recent years, the Kondas Centre has focused on the creative art by pople with special needs, collecting it at several welfare institutions and day care centres all over Estonia. As a result, there are about 400 works in the art collection.

The goal of the Kondas Centre is to research and present Estonian outsider art, and appreciate the creative works of people with special needs. As outsider art has still not been much researched in Estonia and it remains a relatively unfamiliar phenomenon for the society, one of the Kondas Centre´s priorities is to work thoroughly on this topic. Another objective is to introduce this highly unique and wild expresssion of outsider art also outside Estonia.