With the announcement of the three winners, the international art competition, organized by the art gallery “Art Pegazs” with the support of the US Embassy in Latvia, has just ended. Young artists, who had a rather unusual task, were invited to take part in the competition. They had to get acquainted with the so-called Cold War period in America and Latvia and then create works of art that combine the cardinally opposite art styles that prevailed in each of the countries at that time. In America it was abstract expressionism, but in Latvia, which was part of the Soviet Union, it was socialist realism.
Antra Dzene, the head of the Art Pegasus Foundation, evaluates the performance of the young artists as very interesting, topical and also philosophically deep.
The works can currently be viewed on the gallery’s “Art Pegazs” Facebook page, but – if the situation allows – in mid-May, they may be viewed on the gallery’s outdoor terrace for a few days.
“It is a great pleasure that the artists went deep. I was pleasantly surprised by the ingenuity, diversity and philosophy,” says Antra Dzene, a member of the board of the Art Pegasus Foundation, about the works submitted to the competition.
The educational aspect was an important condition in the competition organized with the support of the US Embassy in Latvia. Therefore, first of all, the participants of the competition received educational material, which allowed them to get acquainted with what happened in America and Latvia during the so-called Cold War and how it was reflected in art. After that, the young artists were able to get to work and their task was to combine two different styles in their artwork – abstract expressionism, which was dominant in America at that time, and socialist realism, which was prevalent in Soviet Latvia at that time.
Out of almost 60 submitted works, 20 entered the finals of the competition. It is very interesting to watch how the motifs of realism are merged with the technique of expressionism – splashes of paint, runoff, elements of Cubism.
The topics of the works are very diverse. From the very personal work “Stalin’s Child”, in which the young artist talks about the deportations his family has experienced in two generations, to works whose authors see many parallels in today’s world of social networks with exaggerated Soviet-era optimistic faces and positive slogans.
The winners of the competition have just been announced: 3rd place won by Agnese Rituma for the work “Picture perfect”, which is a convincing story about a modern woman in form and content, 2nd place won by Aivis Pīzelis for the painting “Create art not war” , which is a work in several layers in a literal and figurative sense, but the 1st place was earned by Pavel Sagalayev for the painting “Entrance”, which is a deeply philosophical work that invites modern people to look for a new entrance in a different and better world.
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