Helēna Heinrihsone

Helēna Heinrihsone’s compositions from the 1980s and 1990s, painted in brightly coloured, planed style with highly simplified drawings, have become classics of Latvian art. And she has continued working in more recent decades. In the painting “Ciao,” Heinrihsone addresses the subject of relationships, which can be understood in two ways: at the level of human psychology and the interaction of colour fields. On the one hand, the human figures embedded in the rectangles of a large-format painting act out a scene of everyday relationships, which due to the lack of details cannot be clearly read like a photograph. On the other hand, the work’s painterly qualities – tonal, warm and cool, foreground and background relationships, proportion and silhouette – reveals a different technique for discussing human psychology. Avoiding esoteric theories about spirituality in painting or the relationships between colours and emotions, Helēna Heinrihsone cleanses human closeness and distance from superfluous details, transforming it into a story about the dramatic life of colour on canvas and between ourselves.

Ciao. 2018.