Exhibition extened until October 31!

LĪGA PURMALE (1948) is one of our most outstanding painters. Her unique style and creative quests led her to introduce photorealism in our art – her painting seems closer to reality than photography. The artist’s subject is nature which is eternal but evolving, elusive and fleeting as the sunrise, mist or shadow. This inspires an awareness in us of the continuum of time, existing in the past and continuing to exist. Our presence is only a brief moment, the most beautiful one given to us. It is the artist’s privilege to illuminate this moment for us.

Līga Purmale has created superb close-ups of nature: a poppy, a cluster of currants and many others. She has also painted figural compositions dominated by a dance, movement or passion as well as city themes including shop windows with the play of lights and reflections, neon lights and streets illuminated by car lights. She has portrayed her beloved people in various situations. She paints what she sees, senses and knows. Her painting is not like that from the twelve-year old girl she once was but from a mature painter whose perception of nature and relationships with it have changed dramatically. Her artworks made during the last three years are on display in the exhibition “In Kurzeme” in the gallery Daugava.

Three years ago Līga Purmale returned to Kurzeme where she spent her childhood. There she now observes the trees, forests, meadows and sky that are in front of her. She had not intended to paint all that, which is hard to believe looking at her new paintings executed in Kurzeme: Edge of a Forest, A Lake, Meadow, Avenue, Field, Hill and Border. How could all that be not depicted? And again there is the feeling of a momentary glance at something great and eternal, of an opportunity to touch it and at that instant to hear one’s inner voice.