HUMANS, BEASTS, AND LANDSCAPES
Verners Lazdāns
HUMANS, BEASTS, AND LANDSCAPES is Lazdāns’s eighth solo exhibition and his first one-man show in Daugavpils. The new project displays the artist’s latest work, where his aesthetic exploration takes on a new direction compared to his previous output, marking a novel and distinctive stage in his professional evolution.
The exhibition features multiple series painted across a four-year span.
In 2021/2022, Lazdāns worked on what he calls his “Family Portraits”. The series was sparked by old family albums. By keeping the portraits free from clear visual markers that would conclusively place them in a specific timeline or setting and even avoiding detailed facial features, Lazdāns aims to titillate the viewers’ imagination, encourage comparisons with their own experiences and prompt a sense of déjà vu. “Family Portraits” is the author’s meditation on private and social memory, exploring human experiences that are as different as they are particular.
In 2022/2003, Lazdāns painted “Imaginary Landscapes”. The large-scale series captured visions of an elusive mental or physical space. Its focus was the wanderlust to find a perfect place to be in, the yearning for internal and external harmony, the longing to belong.
In 2023/2024, Lazdāns returned to his “Human Animals”, a theme he has pursued with varying intensity throughout his creative career. For more than a decade, Lazdāns lived and maintained a studio in Salacgrīva, in a secluded spot surrounded by forests, where shadows creep from the woods, and eerie animal sounds pierce the silence, teasing human imagination in the magic hours when day fades into night. The artist draws from his experience and subconscious, which holds imprints of countless encounters with nature, to create images that seem pulled from our collective unconscious, instantly identifiable and perceivable through intuition. They make us rethink our notion of the natural, upset the balance between the real and imagined, the rational and irrational, and play with the blurred lines at the intersection of biology and social constructs.
Lazdāns describes his method in the following terms: “My process is a game where I create images and indirectly look for common threads between the personal and universal. To enhance this state of unpredictability, continuous flow and vulnerability, I work fast in the alla prima technique. My sculptures, too, are free improvisations – I let the material guide me. I keep my touch primeval and focus on the process because I believe it can take me where rationality can’t. My works are fundamentally experimental; they are meant to question the veracity of my perception. First, I accept that the world may not be the way I perceive it, which tells me we may well abandon our attempts to explain everything away. If physicists describe the invisible world, why can’t art do the same with its own toolkit?”
Lazdāns graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia with a BA from the Design Department (1997) and an MA in painting (2008). His design portfolio includes public and private interiors, graphic design works and other commissions. In the early 2010s, Lazdāns made a strong debut with several solo exhibitions at the Alma Gallery, which led to multiple cooperations with other galleries. Besides painting, Lazdāns discovered a passion for ceramics, which took him to kilns in Aizpute, Roja and Salacgrīva, as well as Kaunas, Lithuania. His vibrant creative record includes multiple group shows and residencies in Latvia and beyond. Lazdāns’s work is held in the Latvian National Museum of Art and the Rīga Porcelain Museum, as well as in private collections in Latvia, Sweden, Denmark, Germany and Austria.
Curator of the exhibition – Iliana Veinberga
The exhibition was financially supported by Latvia’s State Culture Capital Foundation.
Exhibition period: 13 September 2024 – 17 November 2024
