Archive

VALENTINE’S DAY

A visual story, drawn from the collection of Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art centre, about today and yesterday from today’s perspective. Do we know more than we can know?

CERAMICS

SANITA ĀBELĪTE ELĪNA TITĀNE Full moon – that is how two outstanding artists, Elīna Titāne and Sanita Ābelīte, describe their exhibition. Full moon was shining during a ceramics residency that had the artists live and work side by side at Daugavpils Fortress. Coincidentally, full moon was also shining whenever Elīna Titāne and Sanita Ābelīte returned to Daugavpils later on. As it happens, even the opening of the artists’ joint exhibition occurs with a full moon casting its light upon their work.

LATVIAN CONTEMPORARY WATERCOLOUR

Latvian watercolour painting is becoming ever more complex. Its emotional rendering is richly nuanced, and pictorial culture is of key importance. In this exhibition, watercolour painting represents all aspirations and quests that have emerged in the course of the historical development of this medium, which makes it difficult to give a straight definition to all these phenomena. Instead of clear-cut, rigid notions, we can talk about movement across a continuum. From graphic to pictorial qualities, from lyrical to expressively dramatic traits and so forth. It means that contemporary watercolour painting cannot be reduced to narrow concepts which fall into strictly outlined technical methods. Rather, one should speak, with good reason, of a broad and open watercolour concept with a wide range of techniques for highly expressive rendition.

Looking outside, looking inside

Arnis Balčus, Ieva Balode, Ieva Epnere, Romans Korovins, Līga Spunde, Alnis Stakle Looking outside, looking inside   “Looking outside, looking inside” is a joint exhibition of six Latvian artists. It showcases artwork which explores the states of looking and seeing. The artists scrutinize the interconnections between experience, memory and forgettance, considering those as both a collective phenomenon and an element of private life. Although the exhibited artwork is grounded in questioning the reality and its representations, it is also markedly introspective, that is to say, it addresses issues such as the artist’s internal states, materialism of the medium, self-representation, identity and self-therapeutic artistic practices.

Harald Jegodzienski

My Path of Questioning What ideological stance do I take and what artistic beliefs do I adopt to support it? Is artistic expression an adequate medium of communication with my fellow humans? What can communicate a message and why does it want to be communicated? Do I wish to stir feelings or address the spirit, or maybe both? If I must have artistic expression, what is this ‘SELF’ that wants to announce itself? Where are the ends of individual ‘red threads’ which reflect my true goals at an age of being flooded with images and information?

Colours

Green – the woods outside my window; blue – the endless variety of the sea; orange – the sun in a summer sky; brown, grey and black – fresh furrows and the road beneath the melting snow; red – the roses in our gardens. The colours in my work are drawn from the splendour of Latvian nature. I create my fibre works by painting little sticks and wrapping them in copper wire, by gluing and sowing, putting layer upon layer until the work seems finished. For digital printing, I use my own photographs. Real to begin with and taken in different seasons, they are processed until I’m left with blurred colour fields. Colour as a flash, an abstract field, a vision. Hardly any white, but in this colour, which includes all others, I am living right now.

The recent paintings of Jon Arne Mogstad: Looking into the contemporary sublime?

The notion ‘dialogue’ could be interpreted as something that is open, never ending, unfinalized. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, “... there is neither a first nor a last word, and there are no limits to the dialogic context (it extends into the boundless past and the boundless future)”.1 In his three recent series of paintings, Mogstad sets out to explore the pictorial space, referring to art history, time and presence. He offers a dialogue in which to find traces of his own art since the 80s, the history of art from Early Renaissance via Baroque and Romanticism to Dadaism, Hard Edge paintings and Abstract Expressionism. Mogstad is investigating different angles and perspectives, and a plethora of pictorial languages from the more figurative to the more abstract ones. In addition to referring to the history of art, his paintings even relate to music, literature, poems, film, and popular culture.

Rhapsody to Womanhood

Free-form romanticism, expressed through symbols and perceptions, is a peculiar narrative of that sensual and elusive feminine charm, which is a reflection of current processes and a longing for identity in the modern world. Who are we, really, and what are we like? A conscious and nuanced choice of colours and selection of subjects, not unlike a rhapsody, replace one another, featuring different characters and performances and highlighting the emotional aspect of lived experience. Touching the canvas changes perception. Conjuring a dynamic interplay of colours works wonders. It is living and experiencing through painting. An opportunity to transform events trough creativity helps to stay true to one’s beliefs and to that which gives a sense of fulfilment.

Made in Kaliningrad. Contemporary Art of Kaliningrad features works created by contemporary artists from Russia and abroad within the framework of the various projects of the Baltic Branch of Russia’s National Centre for Contemporary Arts (incorporated into ROSIZO) and united by the theme and context of Kaliningrad. This project enables international audiences to understand and to feel the environment and people that inspire contemporary artists as they seek to address some of the current issues and burning problems of today. What connotations are attached to Kaliningrad – an enclave that has no border with the metropolis? How do we make sense of words such as Soviet, Russian and national? How do ethnic and gender identities play out in everyday life and how does the social context affect humanity and privacy?

MEMORY BOX EXHIBITION OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY CERAMICS COMPETITION

Anticipating the centenary of the Latvian State and the 2nd Latvia International Ceramics Biennale, Latvian Centre for Contemporary Ceramics, in cooperation with Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, offers an exhibition of the international ceramics competition MEMORY BOX. The exhibition is organised as a tribute to Pēteris Martinsons (1931-2013) – an outstanding Latvian ceramicist, who frequently created ceramic memory boxes to immortalise his memories of places and acquaintances.