Riga - Art lovers have just a couple of more weeks to catch the Liga Purmale retrospective now showing at the State Museum of Art in Riga. Purmale is a key figure in contemporary Latvian painting, and her gentle style definitely flatters to deceive.
"In fact, I'd have been a perfect object for Freud's research," says Purmale, who studied at the Latvian Academy of Art between 1969-1975.
Purmale came to prominence in the 1970s when she mounted an exhibition of hyper-realist painting together with her husband Miervaldis Polis. The exhibition was controversial at the time because hyper-realism was considered a nonconformist genre by the Soviet authorities.
Purmale's painting style combines pure objectivity, a romatic sense of color and a photographically precise treatment of form. Her more recent paintings have mostly focused on nature and space.
Purmale's father died when she was just 6-months- old and she spent the rest of her unusual childhood growing up in a house filled with strong-minded women. It was her mother's decision to turn her into an artist.
Being a child, Purmale more naturally dreamed of being an actress instead, but she developed a complex at an early age about her appearance and so ended up going into art anyway.
"From the very first day of my life I knew, that I was going to be a Something," Purmale explains cryptically.
She says that she has always been overwhelmed by the thought that an artist has to sacrifice his or her life to art, and art alone, if they really want to excel at it. Purmale has certainly done that. Having divorced her serial womanizer of a husband long ago, Purmale has devoted her life to her work. But it's gratifying to see that despite the hardships of her life, her work retains its glorious love of light.
"I am always asked why I paint landscapes. But I don't paint landscapes! My work has nothing in common with landscapes. It is simply something where there exists air, and something that catches the light. Light is all and that's it!" she says. o
Until June 26
The State Museum of Art
10 Krisjana Valdemara St., Riga
