Solo exhibition by artist Valda Mežbārde at the Rainis Home in Berķenele
As of today, 22 July, solo exhibition “Shore” by artist Valda Mežbārde, assembled from the collection of Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre, is available at the Rainis Home in Berķenele, Kalkūne Civil Parish.
Artist Valda Mežbārde, now firmly associated with Daugavpils, was born in Rīga in 1946. As a child, she drew prolifically and with great enthusiasm and was an avid reader. Later, she studied art at Janis Rozentāls Secondary School of Arts and at the Art Academy of Latvia. At the turn of the 1960s and 1970s, she worked as a photographer at the Latvian Museum of Art, where she could examine original works by Latvian artists, gain experience with organising exhibitions and meet different people from the art world. Valda arrived in Daugavpils in 1973. Back then, many young artists came to live and work here. Later, many would leave the city, but Valda remained connected to Daugavpils and its art life. In 1974, she was admitted into the Latvian Artists Union. In the years that followed, she would continue to energise the creative life of Daugavpils and locally based artists. Also, she was among the greatest contributors to the Art Days Festival in Latgale. Valda has participated in a number of plein airs and painted with zeal and compulsion, testing her mettle with large-scale canvases and monumental murals. She exhibits since 1969 and has had more than 15 solo exhibitions in Latvia and beyond.
The exhibition “Shore” features paintings by artist Valda Mežbārde that were handpicked from the collection of Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre to display the artist’s work from the 1990s and her more recent outputs. Thematically, the images of the shore and the horizon have always been important to the artist, and they remain recurrent sources of inspiration that she returns to, time and again. They are also semantically associated with Mežbārde’s painterly style – her canvases have an expressive compositional structure and evince a rational, almost sparing attitude to colour. The artist’s paintings resemble a shoreline, where gusts of wind have swept away all excesses, leaving only the grounds for reflection.
