Soul in Close-Up: Rothko Museum Opens Major Exhibition from Its Collection
On 2 October, the Rothko Museum will open “Soul in Close-Up”, a major exhibition bringing together rarely seen works by Latvian and international artists from the museum’s collection. Spanning painting, printmaking, ceramics, photography and video, the show will be part of the museum’s permanent display until October 2028.
Conceptually, “Soul in Close-Up” looks at the many dimensions of being human – physical and rational, emotional and spiritual. Across works by more than forty artists, it moves from portraiture and questions of identity to traumatic memory, subjective experience and the subconscious, taking the viewer from figurative art to abstraction and conceptual work.
The Latvian artists include Ieva Iltnere, Rasa Jansone, Ilona Romule, Miķelis Fišers, Romāns Korovins and Jānis Mitrēvics, alongside émigré artists Daina Dagnija and Aleksandrs Karpovs. The international selection spans several generations and includes artists who have taken part in the museum’s international symposiums and competitions, among them Joy Kloman (USA), Ioannis Anastasiou (Greece) and Joanna Mankiewicz (Poland).
“Soul in Close-Up” is the latest instalment in a sequence of collection exhibitions launched in 2021 with “Found in the Collection” and followed by “No. 2 [Untitled]” in 2023. The series traces the growth of the Rothko Museum Collection over the years, foregrounding its focus on works that connect with Rothko’s legacy.
For the first time, a Rothko Museum collection exhibition brings contemporary art into a deliberate dialogue with the region’s cultural heritage. Works from the art collection of the Daugavpils Museum – now a new structural unit of the Rothko Museum – extend the exhibition’s perspective into the history of art in Latgale. This regional strand features Mārtiņš Zitmanis and Ivo Folkmanis.
The exhibition’s curator Zane Melāne (Head of Collections, Rothko Museum) says:
“At a time when life feels increasingly fragile, we chose to focus this collection exhibition on the human. From expressive portraits to what lies deep in the subconscious, works by more than forty artists invite us to look closely at the many ways we embody and make sense of our humanity.”
On opening day, the museum will also unveil the Mark Rothko 2026 International Painting Symposium Exhibition, alongside a multimedia Silent Room dedicated to paintings from Rothko’s classic period and the renewed exhibition of the artist’s life.
The joint ceremony begins at 4 p.m. Admission is free.
Support: Daugavpils City Council and State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia
Publicity image: Linda Kozule, “Breathe In” (2025). Oil on canva, 165 x140 cm (detail), Rothko Museum Collection
