Ģirts Muižnieks

Ģirts Muižnieks came onto the Latvian art scene in the 1980s. He is a member of the “Gentle Fluctuations” generation of artists, who made significant changes to the Latvian artistic landscape. Muižnieks’ interest is in the painting process as an endless game with the drama of colour. His expressive, broad brushstrokes, paint pouring and dripping, streaks and scrapes do not demand that the viewer seeks a concrete answer; rather, they are an invitation to follow the mad, subtle, sensitive and mysterious language of colour. References to the presence of human forms in Muižnieks’ paintings have always been scant emphases on certain individual elements. For example, in the 1990s he modelled eyes and lips in his painting world.

 In “Love or Opera”, promoted by the title, we also automatically look for figures and images, trying to find a hidden story. But the artist is not retelling some dramatic scene or opera mise-en-scene. His only affiliation with opera may be the high degree of subjectivity and artfulness of artistic language, which has never prevented music, stage design or Muižnieks’ colour fields from stirring existential experiences in viewers and opening the doors of the emotional world.

Love or Opera. 1993.