Maksla XO Gallery  at POSITIONS BERLIN 2015

This year „Maksla XO” gallery is going to present at POSITIONSBerlin 2015, recent works of one established Latvian artist - Ieva Iltnere and three young and emerging Latvian artists Arturs Berzins, Paulis Liepa, Paula Zarina.

Ieva Iltnere "Love forever" 2015, acrylic on canvas, 150x200 cm

Ieva Iltnere (1957, Latvia) – the painter Ieva Iltnere’s touch could be described as gently defiant. She has succeeded to retain her unique and recognizable style while transforming and experimenting at the same time, and somehow managing to be always contemporary. Ieva Iltnere’s paintings achieve their inimitable power by making super temporal aestheticism, ornamentation and beauty to mix with documentation of the era, irony and even social commentary. The paintings are unique with their paradoxicality – not quite intellectual and yet vaguely stimulating the mind, never allowing to trust one’s senses completely. Feelings and sensibility are present, yet susceptible to displacement. Everything is perfect, yet nothing is in its proper place.

Arturs Berzins (1971, Latvia) – is one of the most prominent contemporary artists with his own unique, especially refined drawing-painting technique. The main emotional impulse is found in the nature and in the environment, where the artist lives. And for that reason in the central role of Arturs Berzins’ art is the relationships between man and nature. His paintings - monochrome and visually ascetic series of works – are conceptually exciting studies of traditions in a landscape painting, culture and system-creating structures, time and the passing of time, as well as traditions of thought. With a painting Arturs Berzins has accomplished a conceptual study of our ideas about nature and the role of art in the creation of our perception of reality.

Paulis Liepa (1978, Latvia) works are black and white and colour images of silence, yesterday’s tea and good old dreams. About things that have a life of their own and about things that tell their own stories. Things that have grown together with time, with each other and ourselves. More and more, the flow of images resembles a diary, where a mess of signs and values, noise, disjointed phrases, clippings, info graphics, chaos of AM waves, a couple of cheap jokes, whistling bullets, death as no more than part of statistics, red peppers and news from the centre of the earth turn into bookmarks.
Paulis Liepa’ works are made in techniques, which in serious printmaking terms are seen as “sub” techniques – collography and cardboard cut. Coagulated layers of glue, cardboard pieces scratched with knife, layers of paint, one over another – rough and comprehensive.

Paula Zarina (1988, Latvia) favorite medium of expression is painting, and she mostly employs oils and canvas because she believes the technical possibilities offered by these materials have not yet been exhausted. The artist has a refined sense of colour and skilfully achieved nuanced tonal depths; her works are characterized by a mysterious femininity, often hidden in laconic compositions that leave space free for the imagination.
The recent Paula Zarina’s paintings are landscape-oriented. The transformation of the horizon line into a join and thereby into the centre of drama creates an emotional experience where the intensity of the horizon becomes the main object.

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