The new season in six exhibitions
Overcoming uncertainty at the Rothko Centre
On 6 November Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre is launching the new exhibition season with six art projects that can be seen as attempts to overcome the uncertainty of this peculiar time.
Awareness, acceptance and impact resistance are individual choices. Each exhibition project has its own tactical approach, but the point they make remains the same – through artistic means of expression uncertainty takes a meaningful form, which makes it possible to outplay it.
The work of Ieva Jurjāne, who puts forward her exhibition “The End & the Beginning. Continued”, might seem decorative and reserved, but only until one perceives the harsh message that it conveys – the only thing we can rely on with absolute certainty is the inevitable course of the circle of life. This conclusion does not have to be tough, though. It is the simple truth, because without the inevitability of life’s progression there would be no thrill in the budding energy of youth, no joy in the peace that comes with experience and no delight in the moment between the two states.
“Elements” by Kaspars Geiduks pinpoints the artist’s personal milestones in the dynamic and occasionally chaotic world. A separate element or combination of them can highlight both timely social topics and timeless metaphysical themes. The exhibition makes one question the structural makeup of objects or bodies and to contemplate the diversity of natural forms. The artist’s ceramic works create a microcosm of their own, where the technical and chemical processes experienced during creation are no less important than its tangible outputs.
The boundary between total emptiness and the great unknown, accessible only through intuition, is what concerns Elga Grīnvalde in her series of paintings “The Power of Nothingness”, where the emotional experiences inherent in human life are mixed with recollections of memorable events from the artist’s past. The display is enhanced with cityscapes painted in Riga and Florence, and nominal landscapes with sea horizons, Tuscan cypresses and mountain passes, where light and shadow can be both definite and sharp or soft and fluid.
In her exhibition “One Size” Lithuanian ceramic artist Eglė Einikytė-Narkevičienė compares humans to modelling clay. Fresh from the box, sticks of modelling clay have an identical shape, but deliberate manipulation or chance can transform them into anthropomorphic forms, the fate of which shall depend on their environment. In her pursuit of chromatic harmony, the author has drawn from the color combinations and compositional arrangements she has seen in Mark Rothko’s paintings, highlighting the relationship between an object and its background, where the standout element is either the body or its silhouette.
“Stories from Japan” represents recent trends in Japanese contemporary printmaking. The exhibition demonstrates traditional influences of naïve and decorative art as well as vivid examples of cold pseudo-realism and direct abstractionism. It embodies the current state of affairs in Japanese printmaking, showcasing the diversity of the field.
The work of artist photographer Siliang Ma (China) is focused on looking for recognizable patterns in chaotic phenomena. The title of his exhibition, “Fluctuations from Disorder to Order”, is a phrase inspired by quantum physics, where quantum fluctuation is the temporary random change in the amount of energy in a point in space. It implies that the basic structure of matter (order) comes from uncertainty (disorder /chaos). The exhibition is being held at Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre for its 3rd International Photography Symposium in cooperation with the Riga Photography Biennial.
The new exhibition season is available until 10 January 2021.
Publicity photo: Siliang Ma (China), Fluctuation from Disorder to Order (MELANCHOLY), digital print, 97 × 200 cm, 2017
