![\"\"](\"https:\/\/rothkomuseum.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/7-Rotko-muzeja-Martinsona-maja.-Foto-\u2013-Pavels-Terentjevs-1024x683.jpg\")
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City of Dreams<\/strong> brings together ceramic works by P\u0113teris Martinsons (1931\u20132013), the Daugavpils-born artist, from the Rothko Museum collection. The core of this extensive retrospective entered the museum in 2013, when Martinsons donated a large body of his work to the then-Rothko Centre. Over the following decade, the collection grew through further gifts from the artist\u2019s family and contemporaries, alongside targeted museum purchases.<\/p>\n Art history remembers P\u0113teris Martinsons as Latvia\u2019s most internationally renowned ceramic artist of the twentieth century. He raised the profile of Latvian art well beyond national borders and reshaped the course of Latvian contemporary ceramics, steering it towards sustained innovation and excellence. As a leading figure among the legendary \u0136\u012bpsala ceramicists and a long-standing participant and artistic director of the Dzintari Symposium, Martinsons played a foundational role in two major cultural phenomena that shifted Latvian ceramics away from its traditional applied role and established it as a vibrant contemporary medium. In doing so, he inspired generations of ceramic artists in Latvia and beyond.<\/p>\n Originally trained as an architect, Martinsons spent his creative life building his own city of dreams \u2013 a visionary world of tectonic structures inhabited by quirky creatures. His ceramic practice is marked by restless inventiveness, moving freely between ideas, forms, materials, and techniques, and shaped by the many places where his works were made.<\/p>\n As Martinsons himself might have said, \u201cby chance, accident, or a beautiful coincidence\u201d, in 2022, the Rothko Museum opened Martinsons House in the former gunpowder magazine of the Daugavpils Fortress\u2019s 7th Bastion. Conceived as a home, the space quietly echoes the artist\u2019s lifelong search for a sense of settlement and belonging \u2013 something his largely nomadic creative life never quite allowed him to achieve.<\/p>\n Alongside its permanent display, Martinsons House hosts a lively programme of temporary ceramics exhibitions. Part of the building serves as an open storage space where visitors can explore the Rothko Museum\u2019s ceramics collection. In the winding corridors encircling the inner chamber, Martinsons\u2019s ink drawings, transferred onto glass, appear as luminous studies \u2013 meditative, precise, and revealing the artist\u2019s lifelong training of hand and thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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