Venere di Urbino

Original oil painting by Kristjan Juusu, 80 × 120 cm, completed in 2026.

Currently on exhibition and available for purchase at Haus Gallery from 17 September 2026.

In Titian’s painting, Venus looks directly at us. In my work, the figure appears instead to withdraw into herself. The gaze no longer commands the viewer, and the erotic becomes less demonstrative, more intimate and psychological.

The relationship between the two works might be summed up in this way: Titian paints a woman whom we observe. I paint a state of being into which both the woman and the viewer are drawn.

The original composition remains recognisable, yet it no longer dominates. As an artist, I am less interested in repeating Titian’s motif than in shifting it into a contemporary painterly space, where body, colour and atmosphere begin to merge into one another — closer, perhaps, to the sensibility of Bonnard or the late Matisse.

The work was created in dialogue with Titian’s Venus of Urbino (Venere di Urbino, 1538).