Maksla XO Gallery at VIENNACONTEMPORARY 2020

Booth - B 03

www.viennacontemporary.at

Artists: Helena Heinrihsone, Ilmars Blumbergs, Paulis Liepa, Marko Maetamm
For VIENNACONTEMPORARY 2020, Maksla XO gallery offers an exposition ABOUT LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS. About love for another person. About love for the city. About love and relationships with the world.

Helena Heinrihsone (1948) is a painterly sensual artist. She paints deeply personal subjects without personal borders, where the joy and sorrow she has experienced herself become private events and feelings of the viewer. At the heart of Helena Heinrihsone’s paintings is a woman, as well as emotional metaphors and poetic fixations of inner feelings. In her paintings the beautiful might include the ugly, but nature helps to resolve the inner conflict between one’s emotions and mind. Relationships of love in Helena Heinrihsone's works are expressed not only through the narration, but also painting itself. These are relationships between warm and cool, tonal relationships, foreground and background relationships, proportions, that are nothing more than a ratio of relationships. Her trademark, that Helena Heinrihsone has developed over the years, is the use of contrasting, saturated colour areas. Yellow versus purple, green versus orange - the colliding lines of the opposite colours of the spectrum are the stories of Helena Heinrihsone’s never-ending relationships!

Ilmars Blumbergs.
Drawing. Books of Venice I
2004, graphite, charcoal, Indian ink, Sealing Wax on paper, 35,4x51,6 cm

On the other hand, Ilmars Blumbergs (1943-2016) talks about love for the city - Venice. Just as Venice played a major role in the fates of many other famous people (J. Brodsky, R. Wagner, Rainis), so Ilmars Blumbergs' relationship with Venice can be compared to the relationship with a woman - his personal siren, just as it was for Odysseus.
In 2004 Ilmars Blumbergs went to Venice to experience his passion for his own Venice. He created “Books of Venice” – extensive artwork  with five series: “Enjoying Life”, “Gray Mist Interchanging With Mornings”, “People”, “Loneliness”, and “Overture”.
Ilmars Blumbergs says: “Venice enlightened me on the subject of time. We are all mortal, but Venice stands still. It is dangerous and at the same time so tempting. Everyone sees themselves in this "liquid mirror", so I can't escape far from myself in this book either.”

The artistic practice of the Estonian contemporary artist, the master of black humour, Marko Mäetamm (1965) focuses on family life and society. The artist explores the gray area between the private and the public. His recent artwork series LOVE IS BLIND is inspired by this very particular uncontrollable mental condition when falling in love to someone or being in love. Blind obsession to be together or near somebody. Unrealistic idealization of the person you may not actually know at all. Voluntarily losing everything only for the sake of some stranger. Feeling like you are sitting in the passenger seat of a car without a driver and even knowing that pretty soon it is going to crash but you cannot help it - the doors are locked and speed is building up. It is most interesting mental condition andMarko Mäetamm wanted to try how it is to talk about it through his works. 

For Paulis Liepa (1978) all starts with the idea (or fact) that life is a never-ending project – trying to build a perfect space around us, finding the best occupation, the right combination between hobby and work, our favourite wallpaper colours and food, the size of apples we like to eat, the type of slippers to wear, etc., etc. down to the most banal details.
“My works are quite abstract, they don’t contain much of tangible information. It has always been important to me that when making a picture of a room with a bookshelf, for example, the backs of the books are arranged according to a certain series of numbers. Not just blindly stacked in different heights. I like to play out life in art. I like encrypted messages. Some history nerds might already get it, just like Golden Ratio or Fibonacci numbers.
I never call my works prints. These are "works" - no more, no less.”

Support:
On the 18th of April 2016 Mākslas galerija Māksla XO Ltd. has signed an agreement Nr. SKV-L-2016/57 with Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA)  for the project "International competitiveness promotion", which is co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund.