The personal exhibition of the artist Ginters Krumholcs, “Why Didn’t You Wake Me Up?”, will be presented at the Arsenāls Exhibition Hall of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Creative Workshop, 2nd floor, Torņa Street 1, Old Rīga) from November 15 to December 15, 2013.
The artist presents a message that is based on intellect and subject associations, as combined with naturalistic forms and a very detailed visual narrative, as emphasised by technically perfect art. Krumholcs (b. 1980) has a romantic and natural style. The time, work and material resources that are needed for his creative method allow one to understand that nothing about his art is accidental. The cleverness that sparkles in terms of intellectual references to the era, culture and society is joined by a boyish and riotous position that the artist takes. Playful story lines in his work contrast with the depth and seriousness of the selected topics, thus putting together expressive signs of 21st-century philosophy.
The artist’s interest in classic modelling of form is slyly combined with the use of individual and ready-made imitations. This provokes the viewer’s visual perceptions, with additional effects being granted by the choice of the artist to use modern synthetic materials in his work, utilising various surface finishes and colours in line with the intention of his depiction.
Despite the unhurried and episodic nature of public art activities, Ginters Krumholcs can be seen as one of Latvia’s most convincing and promising young sculptors. That was confirmed by the fact that his personal exhibition, “May Day” (Māksla XO Gallery, 2011) was nominated for the most prestigious prize in Latvian art – the Purvītis Prize – in 2012.
The new “Why Didn’t You Wake Me Up?” exhibition is a conceptually unified and epic story about love, the loss of time, and the importance of the moment. The artworks have been inspired by everyday events such as an employee of a morgue who is working with a coffin and has been spotted by the artist while driving his car, or a visit to an archaeological dig at a mass grave from the ancient era of the Black Death. After analysing these visual and emotional experiences, the artist has focused his attention on the peculiar relationships which emerge between two different forms of the physical existence of human beings, accenting the bitter sense of destiny in terms of the amount of time that is given to each person.
In putting together his exhibition, the artist demonstrates contemporary spatial thinking, using a unified story to deal with various formal assignments which have to do with monumentality and fragmentation. The central work in the exhibition focuses on an area of sculpture that is rarely used in art today – a relief, which is more commonly used in monumental, not indoor pieces of art. Thus Ginters Krumholcs changes the every variable location of the exhibition into a permanent space for his ideas, also turning the momentary into the eternal. With the use of a fragmented round sculpture, moreover, the artist seeks to dematerialise the reality of the specific exhibition space, forcing the imagination of the viewer to project the spatial context of the artefact in a visual way.
The content, form and semantics of the presentation allow the artist to invite visitors to his exhibition to engage in existential and inner considerations. “Why Didn’t You Wake Me Up?”
Text: Daina Auziņa
