{"id":282167,"date":"2026-02-14T09:26:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T07:26:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visitdaugavpils.lv\/gaisma-uz-klusuma-slieksna-rotko-muzejs-piesaka-gada-pirmo-izstazu-sezonu\/"},"modified":"2026-02-17T10:43:57","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T08:43:57","slug":"gaisma-uz-klusuma-slieksna-rotko-muzejs-piesaka-gada-pirmo-izstazu-sezonu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visitdaugavpils.lv\/pl\/gaisma-uz-klusuma-slieksna-rotko-muzejs-piesaka-gada-pirmo-izstazu-sezonu\/","title":{"rendered":"Light at the Threshold of Silence: Rothko Museum Announces Spring Exhibition Season"},"content":{"rendered":"

At 4.00 p.m. on Friday, 20 February, the Rothko Museum opens its first exhibition season of the year with six new projects bringing together artistic voices from Italy, Finland, and Latvia. Moving from contemplative and restrained non-figurative painting and installation to photographic narratives that trace experience as it inscribes itself on mind and body, the season echoes silence, light, belonging, memory, and stillness.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Gregorio Botta: \u201cPainting Brings You Home\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Gregorio Botta (Italy) is the first Italian artist to exhibit solo at the Rothko Museum in Daugavpils. The city that gave birth to Mark Rothko and his Abstract Expressionism now represents a \u201chome\u201d for a silent, contemplative form of non-figurative painting \u2013 an ideal legacy that has long inspired Botta\u2019s artistic research.<\/p>\n

According to the exhibition\u2019s curator Bruno Cor\u00e0, art historian and critic, although Botta\u2019s practice unfolds through a plurality of media, often in three-dimensional installations and sculptures, it is grounded in painting understood as an originating artistic gesture and continues to be deeply meditative:<\/p>\n

\u201cUsing natural materials such as wax, rice paper, water, glass, leaves, and stone, the artist creates rarefied works that evoke emptiness and silence through minimal forms.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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Over the years, Botta has exhibited in important museums and institutions in Italy and abroad, establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices of contemporary Italian art. At the Latvian exhibition, around thirty works are presented, some created specifically for this occasion.<\/p>\n

Rose-Mari Torpo: \u201cStrange Light\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Inspired by the fragile threshold moments of dawn and dusk, Finnish abstractionist Rose-Mari Torpo paints shifting, almost illusory spaces where light, colour, and movement generate immersive encounters. Working across canvas, paper, polyester, and found readymade materials, she experiments with spray paint, acrylic, and ink to test the boundaries of painting itself, letting the work extend beyond its frame and become an active spatial element.<\/p>\n

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Curator Tatjana \u010cernova highlights the artist\u2019s recent engagement with iridescent materials, which refract and reflect light, intensifying the inherent dynamism of her compositions:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt times her surfaces resemble atmospheric dust; at others they appear liquid, or more solid and congealed. The structural indeterminacy of Torpo\u2019s painting corresponds to an emotional register that remains consciously suspended and mutable, existing beyond figuration.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Artists from Latgale: \u201cBorderland\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Rothko Museum\u2019s annual spring exhibition of Latgale artists turns its gaze to the border, both as a line on a map and as a threshold of imagination. Bringing together sixty-four artists across generations and media, it reflects a shared connection to Latgale as a home, muse, crossroads, or point of departure.<\/p>\n

Curator Aivars Baranovskis frames Borderland as a mental and physical space between staying and leaving, tradition and modernity, the local and the global:<\/p>\n

\u201cBeyond geography, the exhibition reflects on art itself as a practice unfolding at the border between normality and abnormality, between what is accepted and what is condemned. Because art\u2019s very purpose is to test and redefine existing boundaries: illuminate the marginal, challenge the norm, and celebrate the richness of experience and meaning life has to give.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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With this conceptual focus, the show is both a meeting point for artists and an invitation for the viewer to see this complex region not just as lines on a map, but as a source of possibility and inspiration.<\/p>\n

RZ Collection: \u201cWays of Seeing\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cWays of Seeing\u201d presents selected works from the RZ Collection \u2013 the private assemblage of entrepreneur and art patron Raivis Zabis (1973\u20132023). Guided by intuition and emotional response rather than systematic acquisition, he approached collecting as a deeply personal, almost artistic process. Contemporary art, which he saw as the clearest mirror of its time, formed the core of his engagement.<\/p>\n

Curator Dace D\u0113li\u0146a-Lipska notes that the exhibition\u2019s title reflects the collector\u2019s belief that art must be seen to be fully alive:<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Zabis, artworks belonged out in the open rather than in storage. Indeed, art truly breathes and comes alive when someone stops to look. This exhibition is an invitation to reflect on ways of seeing \u2013 art, time, and our shared humanity.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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J\u016blija Verbicka-Vasi\u013cjeva: \u201cHabitus\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In \u201cHabitus\u201d, J\u016blija Verbicka-Vasi\u013cjeva presents a photographic series unfolding as a visual and emotional inquiry into the boundary between appearance and experience, between what is visible and what is lived. Working at the intersection of documentary observation, subtle staging, and directorial control, the artist constructs a finely calibrated narrative that traces how social environment, upbringing, and personal history inscribe themselves in posture, gaze, and silence, shaping how we relate to ourselves and others.<\/p>\n

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Curator Tatjana \u010cernova observes how in Verbicka-Vasi\u013cjeva\u2019s practice, habitus moves beyond its sociological origins to become a lived imprint \u2013 an experience absorbed into the body, behaviour, and emotional memory:<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the heart of the exhibition lies an understanding of the human being as a process rather than a fixed state, drawing attention to the entanglement of individual stories with collective experience and urging viewers to consider how we all reflect the world around us.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

P\u0113teris Martinsons: \u201cReflection\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In 2026, the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Ceramics partners with the Rothko Museum towards an exhibition series at the Martinsons House gallery to mark the 95th anniversary of the Latvian ceramic artist P\u0113teris Martinsons (1931\u20132013). Drawing on works from Latvian and international museum collections, the programme offers a wide-ranging view of the artist\u2019s impressive creative legacy.<\/p>\n

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The first exhibition in the series presents large-scale ceramic sculptures from the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art. Curator Valent\u012bns Petjko highlights the exhibition\u2019s anchoring diptych \u201cReflection\u201d \u2013 early yet assured figurative abstractions where the human figure is distilled into geometric minimalism and archetypal signs. Meanwhile, the later works articulate Martinsons\u2019s mature visual language, shaped by architectural thinking, sculptural experimentation, and a pronounced engagement with graphic line.<\/p>\n

Exhibition Dates and Opening Night<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Rothko Museum\u2019s spring exhibition season runs from 20 February to 24 May 2026.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Admission to the new exhibitions is free on opening night.<\/p>\n

The Rothko Museum\u2019s spring exhibition season was prepared in partnership with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Ceramics, the Latvian National Museum of Art and Il Cigno Arte, with valued support from the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Daugavpils City Council, Italian Embassy in Latvia, Nordic Culture Point, Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and Caparol.<\/p>\n

Publicity images:<\/p>\n