The Urban Landscape

Exhibition Līga Purmale. The Garden of Past Pleasures

In the 1990s, photographically depicted fragments of reality reappeared in Līga Purmale's works, showing urban life, its environment, and rhythm – cafes, city traffic, accidental passers-by, representatives of subcultures, tango dancers, boxers, and graffiti artists. The protagonists of these paintings do not pose. They are like spontaneous documentary photographs. In her cycle of paintings, CITY TOUR (2009), the artist portrays city life as though in a snapshot taken from the window of a tourist bus. This cycle of paintings shows the artist's perspective on the contemporary city and its characteristic symbols in a concentrated fashion. The work also puts into sharp relief the contrasts present in urban space and within society, between depictions of celebrities and peoples' real lives, as well as between historical events, their culture of remembrance, and contemporary possibilities. The artist reflects the complex and multi-layered nature of today's society. It is a tension between the personal and the collective, the historical and the contemporary.