| Eye in the Egg | |
| Artist: | Ülo Sooster |
| Year: | 1962 |
| Type: | oil on paper |
| Height Metric: | 75.0 |
| Width Metric: | 109.5 |
| Metric Unit: | cm |
| Imperial Unit: | in |
| City: | Tartu |
| Museum: | Tartu Art Museum |
Eye in the Egg (Estonian: Silm munas) is a 1962 oil on paper painting by the Estonian artist Ülo Sooster in the Tartu Art Museum.[1]
This painting shows an abstract egg-shaped form that opens into an infinite number of such opened-egg-shaped forms. It was painted in the period after the artist was released from 7 years hard labor in a Soviet prison camp when he was living in Moscow on Sretensky Boulevard with several other artists then painting and working in the non-conformist style.
Sooster was experimenting at that time with motifs of the egg taken from René Magritte, and they symbolized for him infinity, evolution, and the experience of timelessness.[2] There were so many repetitions of the egg in later works by Sooster that his grave has a stone egg on it.[2] On 1 December 1962 this work was shown in Moscow in an exhibition called "Manege", hoping to gain Soviet recognition for their modernist art, but which sadly backfired, receiving a threat from Khrushchev to send them all into exile.[2]
The shape of the eggs is not exact and the "eye" in the title may refer to the central shutter-like doors in the egg that are similar to the shutters over the lens of a camera, a possible reference to surveillance cameras. The edges of the egg shapes are contoured to look almost as if made in metal, a trompe-l'œil effect that gives the whole a machine-like quality, as if the "eye" could blink mechanically.