Archive

Exhibition of the best works of the Ventspils 2017 photo contest

“Ventspils – a family and recreation-friendly city”. 40 works by 17 authors are presented at the exhibition, showing a daily life and special events of the people of Ventspils, as well as the beauty of the city throughout all seasons. The Ventspils photography contest is held for the fourteenth year already. It is aimed at selecting attractive and artistic-expressive images of Ventspils for their further placement in the Ventspils city travel brochures, maps, calendars and other printed materials to be published, as well as at offering these images for the public view at the exhibition. This year, 335 works by 26 authors were submitted for participation at the contest, the youngest of the authors was eight years old only.

WATER AND COLOUR

Aleksandra Šļahova The power of springtime waters, so deep and swift of pace. Such are the associations stirred by Aleksandra Šļahova's watercolours. Dualism of colour, evident in stark contrasts between muted and bright hues, is strikingly direct in carrying the artist's message to the audience. The viewer observes and sees a story, a conversation that is struck when colour meets water. This exchange spills onto paper as a letter about things felt, experienced, collected and, ultimately, shared with the audience. The artist is free in her manipulations with water and colour. She lets the currents of emotion flow cross large and small watercolour fields, pastures and meadows, running into oceans seen and imagined, pouring out into wide, open spaces, epitomizing the overwhelming power of nature itself.

Another Spring – In Flood.

Every year we wait for the coming of spring, because it brings light, vigour and life. Every spring comes with a degree of flooding – in nature, in life and in whirlwind events. It seems that this year real floods have passed us by, but the floods of life and experience remain. Remain to make us think about the force of life, which we try to make sense of through poetry, painting and our own experiences.

Madara Gulbis. Invisible Worlds

The paintings by Madara Gulbis are a realm of their own, where Colour rules supreme. One might be tempted to say that they are completely devoid of reality, but such an assertion would mean that the world consists exclusively of matter, which we well know not to be the case. The paintings by Madara Gulbis are packed with natural impressions and emotions. The impulse for their creation comes from directly captured fragments of reality.

Speechless: New Visual Semantics

This exhibition covers Rusudan’s work for 2017 through 2018. She has been painting since she consciously came into this world. Her canvases are colouristically enlivened depictions of her life, manifestation of her dreams, emanation of her thoughts and footprints of her raw, jarring emotions. Rusudan has participated in 2015 Venice Biennale and numerous personal and group exhibitions in the West. She lives and works in Georgia.

On the Side of the Sun. Testament to Time by Uldis Briedis

The essence of Uldis Briedis’ photographic archive is measured in time and not size. His path as a documentarian has crossed several time zones – the Soviet period, the National Awakening, the chaos of the 1990s, our current time and something else rather unfathomable to the mind - which I’d like to refer to as congealed time in Siberia. The exhibition at Daugavpils Mark Rothko Centre is going to be the largest show of Uldis Briedis’ work to date, and will feature, as a testimony to time, a significant number of images gathered over 50 years.

What is an image? Life and the Art of Perception

Petra Langsdorff, Siegfried Lehman, Sven Hoffmann From the time we are born till we die, we are all surrounded by images. Our time is the time of images, whether moving or fixed. From Plato’s doubt about the images we see, the question “What is an Image?” has occupied the minds of philosophers, art historians, etc. and continues to do so today. Does our mind form the images we see, as Kant believed, or is our mind a blank slate on which the images leave their stamp, as Locke thought? As Harald Klinke puts it, “Visual perception involves thinking, and thinking makes use of visual imagery. … Picture-making is […] central to being human. The power of images stems not from the images themselves but from humans, who give them meaning.” (Art Theory and Visual Epistemology, 2014: 5&6)

Tulips

Jānis Salens May is the tulip season in Latvia. The bright and brilliant blooms stand out in stark contrast against green foliage and delight onlookers year after year, and 2018 is no exception. Although the unseasonably warm weather has slightly shifted the usual tulip season, this exhibition presents an opportunity to step back in time to once again rejoice in the magnificence of these flowers and enjoy their wonderful smell.

2nd international photography symposium

Photography is a unique means of communication between acquaintances and strangers alike. It also comes in good stead as a way of communicating with oneself. It can blend astonishing reality with images from our experience. Daugavpils is big enough to have given participants of the 2nd photography symposium plenty of material for studies of local reality and to have made this experience an exciting adventure. At the same time, the town is also small enough to have enabled each photographer to recap this adventure in a brief but convincing visual narrative. Let there always be light wherever photographers encounter an emergent image! Vilnis Auziņš

ENCOUNTERING THE SILENCE OF NATURE

Within the white expanse of this publication and of watercolour paper, alongside miniature porcelain figures, enveloped in elements of nature hides the artist Ieva Jurjāne. Ieva graduated from the Painting Department of the Art Academy of Latvia and in the last twenty years has organized a dozen personal exhibitions, created illustrations for magazines and children’s books, as well as worked on a number of animations. Ieva’s name is often heard in relation to the world of film and opera. Ieva has been passionate about sceonography and costume design since graduating from the academy, and the meeting of these spheres has always given the artist the opportunity to express herself in both grandiose and miniature format works.