Sandra Krastiņa. Cut Flowers

From 30 January to 9 May 2027, the exhibition Sandra Krastiņa. Cut Flowers will be on display in the 4th-floor galleries of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1, Riga).

Sandra Krastiņa (1957) is a painter who can imbue specific images with a broad sense of generalization. She does not shy away from autobiographical motifs either, expressing a critical, even political stance. For example, in her 1986 work Line Up!, Krastiņa depicted schoolchildren lined up like soldiers. It was one of the few paintings in Latvian art during the occupation period that expressed a critique of specific socio-political realities, calling for change.

Forty years on, the artist has once again turned her attention to her school days. However, these are not nostalgic, romantic memories but rather a sharing of a traumatic experience, rekindled by the current political situation. Themes and images that are either excluded from society’s collective memory as ‘outdated’, ‘irrelevant’ or simply unpleasant, or else transformed into souvenirs of the past, are revealed with terrifying force in the face of the very real threat from Russia to restore the Soviet Union within its former borders following the war against Ukraine. The receptiveness of sections of the local population to undemocratic ideas transforms these nightmarish memories into a repetitive, intense sense of anxiety.

In her latest series of paintings, the artist has depicted Soviet-era school uniform designs and “the 1st of September flowers”– gladioli. The artist’s characteristic blue color is used here with an expanded meaning – both specifically derived from the school uniforms and symbolically transferred to the images of the flowers. The expressive brushwork in the artist’s works is not formal; together with other ingeniously employed elements (the grid pattern in the background, drips and smudges) it highlights the unsettling nature of the composition.

The artist does not depict human figures, yet her perspective is distinctly humane and empathetic – the children have grown up – ‘emerged’ from their shells, each with their own character, individuality and hopes, which the uniform environment did not allow to be seen. Those who lived through the period of occupation will remember it; younger generations are invited to view the exhibition as both a testimony and a warning.

Exhibition curators: Inese Baranovska and Vilnis Vējš