I would be willing to compare this exhibition with Pippi Longstocking and Maria Callas teamwork
SIGITA DAUGULE. PAINTING
Sigita Daugule's so far largest solo exhibition "Painting" is on view at the Art Station “Dubulti”. It consists of new, previously unexhibited works – large-scale oil paintings with a content similar to an encrypted diary, as well as a thematic cycle created from cat fluids and talking to Aspazija, a prominent Latvian poet, whose museum is at your fingertips from the Art Station “Dubulti”. Sigita Daugule's solo exhibition “Painting” is supported by Jūrmala City Council and the State Culture Capital Foundation.
How to understand Sigita Daugule's work? At the cradle of her style (emerged in late 90s) there are significant memories of the expansion of modern art with its uprising against classical culture and against man as a whole mayor. The criteria of modernism are abstract concepts, abstract emotions, and the order set by chaos. Sigita Daugule's painting has closely merged with these criterias, but not only with them. It also merges with the dynamics of postmodernism – with those fragments of classics, larger or smaller, wich floating slowly through the culturspace and spreading their energy, particularly tempting since the 70s. Postmodern situation determines the composite essence of Daugule's paintings – they contain both classical elements, such as color harmony, narrative and imaginative plots, and are modernistic, with tipical too self-sufficient, too ambitious masses of colors and strokes, that create abstract dramas. These dramas take place in Daugule's paintings in a similar way to those created by Pierre Soulages (1919) or Antoni Tàpies (1923-2012) in their work, but in Latvia it is in coherence with painters like Eduards Grūbe (1935) or Džemma Skulme (1925-2019), with their monumental expressiveness (Skulme acknowledged that she feels closeness with Daugule's art).
Sigita Daugule paints as an agent of chaos theory, who provokes deep color dramas. And "deep" here must be understood literally, because it happens not like a cultural drama of color harmony that shakes taste, as it is, let’s say, in expressionism, but rather the chemical collisions of paint on canvas. Varnishes and solutions are applied on oil paints that converts them beyond recognition. It sounds and also resembles alchemy. The painting in this process is the Great Work (Magnum opus). Paints, varnishes and various solutions in Sigita Daugule's paintings changes each other's structure, eliminates the surface or the binder, erodes, cracks or turns into indeterminate mass. All this is directed by the painter with great passion. Occasionally she leaves the workshop and goes to pigeons, which are almost accustomed, but soon she's rushing back to work, saying: "I wonder what has happened in the meantime!". Further actions are often determined by sudden impulses that the artist accumulated while maintaining a heightened focuss on various ‘household details’.
In such a very intriguing, very unpredictable, yet still monitored and purposefully managed process the exhibition was created. On the first floor there is an almost eight meters long painting “Untitled”, which started in the range of gray tones so close to Daugule, but due to the Covid-19 emergency in spring 2020 it changed dramatically. "Grey seemed impossible," says Daugule. Now we see a dazzling oil painting, the color of which is determined by various iron oxide red tones. In the depths of the hall is the large gray "Rabbit on Run” (later grey was possible again). It grew out of the Lewis Carroll’s rabbit, the master of the wonderland (or augmented reality), and his world is made up of dozens of shades of gray. The rabbit has become a guide to this exhibition with its advent at the beginning, middle and transition to the second floor. "Boards" is an epic set of four paintings which do not lag behind the symbolic potential of famous in Latvia rija (threshing barn) by painter Jānis Kalmīte (1907-1996). "Wall", "Complete Nonsense" and "Water Damage" are outcomes from already mentioned impulsive expansion of everyday details into the plot of the painting - an opera-worthy drama from a small case. The second floor or "Aspazija's Museum" is dedicated to Aspazija's cats, who once lived in the poet's house. Ten works expands the technical arsenal with wooden bases and thickly coated acrylic paste in which there’s made a drawing with a brush tip. Painting directly onto the wall breaks down the order of the "cat museum” opening divine possibilities of chaos.
I would be willing to compare this exhibition with Pippi Longstocking and Maria Callas teamwork - so ambitious, but at the same time honest, so pensive, but in the end - so joyful.
Sigita Daugule (1971) is an artist who hides her popularity in a pedantic everyday life, built on the principle of "painting and the rest”. Everything, from pigeons and Brussels sprouts to telephone conversations, photography, horses, walks and passionate book reading, has a purpose how art is created in Sigita Daugule's workshop. After obtaining a master's degree from the Latvian Academy of Arts in 1998 (I. Zariņš' and A. Naumovs’ Monumental Painting Workshop), Sigita Daugule has been living and working in Austria and Germany for the next three years, receiving a scholarship from the Austrian Federal Chancellery and KulturKontakt Austria in Vienna (1999, 2000) and Künstlerhaus Luke Scholarship in Arenshop (2001). She has been organizing solo exhibitions since 1998, participating in group shows, including "Gada glezna" ("Painting of the year") at Agija Sūna gallery, but in 2010 won a quartier 21 scholarship, with which she worked for two months in the Museum Quarter in Vienna, still being the only one in Latvia in this prestigious opportunity. The spirit of Sigita Daugule's researcher gift is reflected in the book “Jānis Liepiņš” about the legendary old master of Latvian painting (2015), but the richly illustrated catalog of Sigita Daugule's painting was published in 2017 (both in publishing house “Neputns”). The works of the painter Sigita Daugule are both in the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art and in the private collections - Swedbank Art Collection, Zuzāns collection and others. Since the two-thousands, her expressionism has also won the hearts of viewers in Austria.
Text: curator of the exhibition Inga Šteimane
————————————————————————
Sigita Daugule's solo exhibition "Painting" is on view at the Art Station "Dubulti"
from 13 November 2020 to 31 January 2021 every day from 9.00 to 18.30. Free entrance (also open on public holidays). When visiting the exhibition, the safety regulations of Covid-19 announced at the relevant time must be observed!
Free public programme planned:
On 13 December at 15.00 the tour is led by the curator,
On January 10 at 15.00 the tour is led by the curator,
Meeting with the artist on January 31 at 15.00.
Art Station “Dubulti” is the only professional exhibition hall in Europe, located in a functioning railway station. It has been operating since 2015, when the multifunctionality of a public space was realized in a building established in the 1970s with a significant concrete silhouette. Art station “Dubulti” creates solo exhibitions of the best Latvian artists and conceptual projects. The program is implemented with the support of Jurmala City Council. The creator of the Art Station “Dubulti” is art critic Inga Šteimane.