At 4 p.m. on Friday 3 July, Latvian ceramicist, associate professor at the Art Academy of Latvia, Līga Skariņa, will open her solo exhibition “Material. Form. Light” at Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Centre.
“Līga Skariņa is all about ceramics, utterly and completely. Every single piece of her work shows that she is obsessed with ceramics and brimming with ideas. Every new exhibition of hers demonstrates a huge potential, creativity and an inexhaustible drive,” says art scholar Māris Brancis.
Thematically, Līga Skariņa’s exhibition at the Rothko Centre is a temple to fundamental ceramic values, where the material becomes a medium for shapes and objects imagined by the author, with light and airiness binding them all together. The exhibition showcases decorative objects and lighting fixtures shaped by Līga Skariņa. Their surfaces and structures are literally entwined with the air and light around them, creating a delicate space of illusionary threads.
Līga Skariņa was born in 1959 in Barkava. In 1978, the budding artist graduated from Rēzekne Secondary School of Applied Arts to pursue tertiary education at the Art Academy of Latvia, where she acquired a master’s degree in 1998. Since 1986, Līga Skariņa has been teaching at the Academy’s Ceramics Department. In 1995, the ceramicist was admitted into the Artists’ Union of Latvia. Līga Skariņa exhibits widely, both in Latvia and abroad, and has had several solo shows. Also, the artist is an active participant in international symposia. Her creativity has garnered a number of awards. In 2019, the artist received the National Design Award of Latvia and an innovation prize from Japan.
The artist describes her work in the following terms: “My medium is the material – clay, stoneware, porcelain. Exposure to these materials gives me creative ideas, visual stories and sculpturesque solutions. In storytelling, form has a massive significance. Volume, dimensional ratio and scale are the backbone of composition. What matters to me is addressing the shape of the material in the dimension of light that pushes the boundaries of compositional ideas and figurativeness.”
The exhibition is on display at Daugavpils Mark Rothko art Centre until 26 July 2020.
During the opening ceremony, the exhibition is available free of charge.
