08.03.2009 00:19
I spent some time checking out art at the fairs this weekend. With all of the talk about the art market being dead and the downturn meaning only big names will be shown because nobody can take a risks on unknowns, I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of hot work I saw from artists I wasn't yet familiar with.
07.01.2009 00:16
Vilnis Vējš, Art Critic I had the opportunity of viewing Helēna Heinrihsone's works of art from the year 2007 in two different situations - in the artist's own studio before the opening of her solo exhibition "Hello, Mole!", and soon afterwards, at the opening of the show. On each occasion the impressions were different. Firstly, picture a late evening hour at the artist's studio, with a lantern lighting the corners of the attic, and the artist pulling out enormous canvases with frightening visions: primitive male torsos, freakishly coloured skulls, and elusive amarant-hine nothingness with dark, lifeless and spindly silhouettes, which only remotely looked like supernaturally large dead roses. Helēna shared her own bewilderment - where did it all come from? - especially those male bodies.... Less than a month later, Heinrihsone's works were in the White Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art. The enormous canvases seemed to be optically smaller, and viewed against the background of white walls they looked more like "carnival delights" (Eduards Kļaviņš).
13.06.2007 00:17
Helēna Heinrihsone - an elegant woman of indiscernible age always dressed in black; a young-in-spirit, free-thinking personality; one of the stars of contemporary Latvian painting. Her name, valued so highly by professionals, has been written into art history letter-by-letter for over thirty years. I think I noticed Heinrihsone's laconic, colourful and stylistically convincing work for the first time in 1978 in a young artists' painting exhibition in St Peter's Church. I knew that up until then the creative path of the emerging artist had been strewn with thorns rather than roses: for a number of years in a row, her characteristically individualist contributions to exhibitions were rejected again and again. This was not due to unprofessionalism, but because of the unexplainable fear of purposeful innovation held by the officials of the stagnation era. Heinrihsone managed to keep her chin up and did not begin to desperately clutch at straws - at popularly commissioned themes, such as seamstresses, builders or the communist youth, commonly varied by her contemporaries. During that depressing situation, encouragement was provided by the attention of painter and theoretician Ojārs Ābols, which was followed by her first commission from the Art Foundation. Nevertheless, when preparing the exhibition "Echoes of Fauvism. Latvian Painting: 1910-1980", I discovered with true amazement, that the Latvian National Museum of Art did not possess any of Heinrihsone's works from the 1970s. The absence was quickly corrected with the acquisition of the much-published composition, "The Conversation" (1978); but the reminder nevertheless remains, that the avantgarde approach of Helēna Heinrihsone, which had already claimed a lasting place in Latvian painting, was routinely ignored by the acquisitions committee of the Ministry of Culture of the time. What this attitude meant at that time to the emerging artist is known only by herself and those close to her, but luckily the long-term official silence did not influence her creative spirit.
Ivars Heinrihsons & Helēna Heinrihsone
