12.10. - 07.11.2017

Galerija "Māksla XO"

Elizabetes iela 14, Rīga, LV 1010

KRISTIANS BREKTE "Mr & Mrs Doe"

"Doe Couple is the focal characters of the exhibition, alongside whom series of unidentified persons’ face features crowd. In a form of installation, they were found and taken from the database of The State Police of Latvia, and turned into paintings, ceramic works and sculptures..."

Brekte’s visual language, which has been developed in a creative career spanning more than ten years, includes links to goth and black metal subculture, street art, religion, art history and pop culture. The artist is fascinated with the dark side of our society, dealing in his works with the notions of death, suffering, sexuality, faith and amorality. The vandalism of the subject matter in the artist’s sculptural installations mixes with formal perfection and technical mastery, uniting sharply critical or revealing references and quotes in the already familiar aesthetics. It is also marked by the use of colour, material, light and sound, always anew pointing to Brekte’s interest in deconstructing such traditional forms of art as painting, sculpture and printmaking and creating a distance from the way they are generally perceived. (curator Elina Sproge)

Kristians Brekte (1981) has received a Master’s degree at the Department of Stage Design of the Art Academy of Latvia. Since 2003, he has organized 13 solo exhibitions, and participated in more than 40  group exhibitions in Latvia and abroad. For his series of works The Madonnas of Riga (2010) Kristians Brekte was nominated for the Purvītis Prize. The artist’s works from the exhibition Gastronomy (2007) were included in Phaidon Publishers’ volume “Younger Than Jesus” (2009), which brings together the brightest international artists under the age of 33. In 2014, Neputns Publishers released a catalogue dedicated to the artist’s work, titled Brekte.
Kristians Brekte is a practicing stage designer, Associate Professor at the Department of Audiovisual Media Art at the Art Academy of Latvia and the Head of Department of Environmental Art at the Faculty of Design.