Maik Kalberg “Greenhouse Carnival”
“Greenhouse Carnival” begins with a memory: a greenhouse, tomato plants, and a Volga, loaded up to drive to the markets of Soviet-era St. Petersburg. I grew up at the crossroads of two worlds—the final days of one, the first glimpse of the other. These oil paintings place this personal history within a broader debate over cultural representation: who stands in the frame, and on whose terms? Greenhouse and the deep ocean—one is the most controlled of worlds; the other, the last territory unclaimed by humanity.
My earliest memories are of a dreamlike greenhouse at our summer house. My parents grew tomatoes and cucumbers there—carefully, seasonally, with a clear purpose—and loaded them into the car to sell at markets in St. Petersburg. It was the late 1980s. The Soviet Union was still standing, but perestroika had begun to break it apart. What I experienced as a child—born in Tartu and raised in Estonia—was a specific historical moment that remains an important memory for me.
The greenhouse stuck with me. It is the most controlled human environment—a space where growing conditions are deliberately managed, where what blooms and what does not is never left to chance. This series of oil paintings places the greenhouse at the center of a much broader discussion. Against a backdrop of tomato and chili plants, the figures occupying this contested space come from various realms of culture, history, and mythology. Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring stands beside a Black photographer. Frida Kahlo next to Trump. Snoop Dogg next to Van Eyck’s Arnofili. Studio Ghibli characters next to ancient Egyptian iconography. And in every painting, a yellow car drifts by like a recurring memory—a car setting out on a journey to the bottom of the ocean.
But the greenhouse does not exist in isolation. The same bluish-green depths, which hint at the ocean water flowing beneath and behind these backdrops, are intentionally a different environment. The deep ocean is one of the last places on Earth that has not yet been fully conquered or exploited. And yet, the machinery of resource exploitation is already moving in that direction. The paintings deliberately maintain a tension between these two environments—one intensively cultivated and the other the last remaining wild one. The greenhouse and the ocean floor: both are dreamlike.
