An exhibition dedicated to our psyche
Media Information October 15, 2025
Invitation to Vidvuds Zviedris largest solo exhibition dedicated to our psyche
Artist Vidvuds Zviedris is presenting an ambitious range of new work - his solo exhibition ONCE GRASS WAS BLUE AND SKIES WERE GREEN is opening at Art Station “Dubulti”, Jūrmala, October 24. “What happens to our psyche when violence becomes ubiquitous, almost mundane, when we keep seeing it and cannot stop it?,” asks Vidvuds Zviedris, who has lived and worked in America since 1995, but returned to Latvia in 2020 and has now opened his largest solo show.
The opening of Vidvuds Zviedris' solo exhibition ONCE GRASS WAS BLUE AND SKIES WERE GREEN at the Art Station "Dubulti" will take place on October 24th at 6:00 PM, while the press tour for the media will take place on October 24th from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM.
“I keep circling the question of where we find ourselves today – surrounded by devices that let us witness, in real time, the most abhorrent and extreme expressions of human behaviour. The history of violence is being rewritten before our eyes. So who exactly are we – participants, passive observers, or accomplices?,” asks Vidvuds Zviedris.
”The exhibition shows a tension between the individual – the fragile human being – and the anonymous power construct of human resources devised for political gain. With contrasts in the scale of the works, and the tension they display, the exhibition addresses the theme of co-responsibility in the contemporary world. Vidvuds Zviedris practice moves freely between painting, sculpture, object, photography, drawing. He relies equally on found materials charged with experience. Drawings by the artist's six-year-old daughter have found their symbolic place in the exhibition,” tells curator Inga Šteimane.
For those who hear an echo of the latvian poet Ojārs Vācietis in exhibition's title Vidvuds Zviedris remarks: “Poetry and art both move the psyche in ways we cannot quite predict or explain. We feel things, without knowing why or how. Vācietis’s lines don’t give clarity – they are a puzzle, a mystery that stirs and opens something in our hearts, makes space for creativity and free interpretation. I hope the viewers see that I have no intention to manipulate. What interests me is work that awakens, not instructs. If art can stir the subconscious, shift the stone inside us, that’s enough.”
Vidvuds Zviedris (b. 1976, Rīga) studied painting at the College of Art and Design in Detroit (1995–1999). Since 2003, he has held eleven solo exhibitions at the McCormick Gallery in Chicago, including Far and Further Still (2025). Zviedris returned to Latvia in 2020. His works are held in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the DePaul University School of Music, the Tisch Library at Tufts University, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Ryerson & Burnham Library at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Library of Latvia.
Public programme:
25th October, 16:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and curator Inga Šteimane, as part of the Jūrmala Autumn Guided Tour Programme
26th October, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane, as part of the Jūrmala Autumn Guided Tour Programme
9th November, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane
29th November, 14:00 (Saturday) – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane
14th December, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane
Vidvuds Zviedris' solo exhibition ONCE GRASS WAS BLUE AND SKIES WERE GREEN at the Art Station “Dubulti” takes place from 24.10.2025 to 01.02.2026. The exhibition is on view every day, including weekends and holidays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
About Art Station Dubulti:
For a decade, Art Station Dubulti in Jūrmala, Latvia, has stood as a quietly radical space within Europe’s cultural landscape, offering an inclusive and experimental platform for daily encounter with contemporary art. A hybrid between railway station and exhibition hall, it sustains its original purpose while extending into public culture through thoughtfully curated and profoundly stirring programmes. The station’s functional overlap, shaped by a daily rhythm of arrivals and departures, continues to guide its curatorial vision towards a layered and inclusive cultural experience. Founded and directed by art historian Inga Šteimane, Dubulti remains the only widely-known professional exhibition space in Europe operating within an active train station. Open since 2015, it keeps adding a new dimension to an iconic Socialist Modernist building conceived by St. Petersburg’s visionary architect Igor Yavein in 1977. Supported by the Jūrmala City Council and the State Culture Capital Foundation, its programme brings together artists and audiences from Latvia and beyond in an environment where art is not secluded from life but folded gently into its motion.
Contacts: Inga Šteimane, curator, director of Art Station Dubulti +371 29548719, steimane.inga@gmail.com
ONCE GRASS WAS BLUE AND SKIES WERE GREEN
Artist Vidvuds Zviedris in conversation with curator Inga Šteimane
Inga Šteimane: The exhibition’s title starts almost like a fairy tale – Once… Is the show itself a bit of a fairy-tale experience?
Vidvuds Zviedris: Not exactly. It isn’t built like a fairy-tale, not in a narrative sense.
Inga Šteimane: Then how would you describe its themes and imagery?
Vidvuds Zviedris: I keep circling the question of where we find ourselves today – surrounded by devices that let us witness, in real time, the most abhorrent and extreme expressions of human behaviour. The history of violence is being rewritten before our eyes. We used to rely on news reports – curated fragments, a journalist’s or photographer’s filtered interpretation of violent events. Now, we are virtually present in the act itself. We witness war, destruction, violence and suffering. It implicates us, draws us in – we watch, and, in a sense, become complicit. So who exactly are we – participants, passive observers, or accomplices?
Inga Šteimane: And that unsettles you the most – us being forced into a quiet acceptance?
Vidvuds Zviedris: Yes. I wonder how we live with that knowledge. The idea first struck me when I was reading Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest, later adapted for film. It follows the family of a German SS officer living what seems a normal life beside a concentration camp. They tend their garden, celebrate their special moments, and chat about the little matters in their daily lives, the children play and go to school, while thousands die beyond the fence. There’s a kind of moral vertigo in that, and I think we’re still in a similar place. What happens to our psyche when violence becomes ubiquitous, almost mundane, when we keep seeing it and cannot stop it? Why does it keep returning – despite all our vehement declarations of “never again”? We coexist with it, there’s no escape.
Inga Šteimane: You have included your daughter’s drawings.
Vidvuds Zviedris: For me, they are the exhibition’s axis. So radiant and full of hope – the rainbow in the sky, the stars, the sun.
Inga Šteimane: So the title takes its first breath from her world – that unclouded idealism.
Vidvuds Zviedris: Exactly. It starts there and then collides with what we know to be true – that the grass isn’t blue and the sky isn’t green. This friction gives the exhibition its texture. The phrase can feel mystical, absurd, or even playful, depending on how you approach it.
Inga Šteimane: With its reversal of natural order, it could also sound like deliberate surrealism, a dream-like, child-like vision reclaimed by an adult imagining a world turned upside-down. Yet in your work, it feels more like a memory of paradise lost, or a glimpse of how the world once seemed before knowledge intruded.
Vidvuds Zviedris: When I look at her drawings, I find myself wondering what happens to that tenderness as we grow. At what point does the survival instinct and scrambling for resources replace the instinct to care? Could those in power ever discuss resource distribution without aggression? Is diplomacy still possible, or are we too primitive, too bound by the animal instinct to dominate or die?
Inga Šteimane: To me, the exhibition shows a tension between the individual – the fragile human being – and the anonymous power construct of human resources devised for political gain. Within the individual lies beauty, but it is gradually erased.
Vidvuds Zviedris: That is how power operates: by dissolving individuality. By turning people into a mass of nameless victims, a neutralised, expandable substance. Language assists there – labels, categories, a vocabulary of control used to brand the victims rather than aggressors. The exhibition carries that sense of the anonymous – the other – as a threat. On the personal level, violence is condemned. Murder and theft are punished. But in the language of power, it becomes normalised as a necessary strategy or even glorified as heroism. And we are so easily swayed. If only we could unlearn those patterns, we could create a healthier society. But we cannot, we are unable. One of my works quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates: How Much Resource Has Been Invested in Lies. The informational space is thick with distortion. How do we breathe within it? How do we find the truth?
Inga Šteimane: So often, we are forced to inhabit only two roles – victim or aggressor.
Vidvuds Zviedris: And sometimes neither role feels chosen. They are simply the conditions we inherit. These are the painful thoughts and themes that follow me into the studio.
Inga Šteimane: Would you call your works intellectual or intuitive?
Vidvuds Zviedris: Mostly intuitive. I’ve actively thought about certain themes, but for the most part, the images surface from the threshold between waking and sleep – that liminal, half-conscious space where logic hasn’t yet taken hold.
Inga Šteimane: On the first floor, your daughter’s drawings meet the large sculptures – a dialogical encounter – and there’s also your own painting – her rainbow reimagined. How do these elements connect? Or do they work against each other?
Vidvuds Zviedris: I painted my rainbow quickly, trying to keep her immediacy intact – no overthinking. Her drawing set the rhythm. The trees, the rainbow, they belong to the same order of nature. My work has never been figurative, more a landscape-oriented movement toward abstraction. But here, the twisted tree trunks, the rainbow’s arc, and the difference in scale – her small page, my large canvas, the monumental wooden sculpture – create a dialogue, symbolic lightness against symbolic weight, a contrast, a tension, and yet an intuitive kinship.
Inga Šteimane: Did working this way – with her sense of immediacy – reveal something new?
Vidvuds Zviedris: It did. I realised how liberating it can be to finish something in one breath and let it stand. I used to paint over and over, searching for depth through destruction. This time, I trusted the first instinctive gesture. Once painted, I wrapped the canvas up and let my twenty-five years of experience rest quietly behind it.
Inga Šteimane: A good decision to avoid the traps of overthinking and revision.
Vidvuds Zviedris: Exactly. It brings to mind the famed confession of Philip Guston, a self-proclaimed moralist, that if he started a painting with a pink square in the left corner, he would have to cover it, fight with it, and then restore it. My struggle is similar, though I approached it differently: to reach what feels essential without smothering it.
Inga Šteimane: The second floor feels more fact-based, more concrete, and more moral in its metaphors.
Vidvuds Zviedris: It begins with my daughter’s drawings – simple, symbolic: the sun, the stars, the clouds. Next to them hangs my constellation, painted after a night in Piebalga. Although made separately, they speak to each other. I found myself still drawn to symbols, even after denying them for years. The second floor expands that impulse through materials – wood, fibre, antiquated clay tiles, drawing, paint, photography. A mirror echoing the old tale of the king who promised a kingdom to anyone who could gaze at their soul’s reflection for sixty seconds – none could. The photographs, too, came from The Zone of Interest; one morning, as I drank my coffee, a skull happened to slide into the frame. It seemed to belong there – a quiet emblem of mortality. The exhibition traces a circle: childhood, death, endurance, cruelty, even a hint of immortality. The first-floor ash trees, once destined for firewood, have been given a second life. Art, at its best, is an act of persistence.
Inga Šteimane: Your practice moves freely between painting, sculpture, object, photography, drawing. You rely equally on found materials charged with experience. How did that openness evolve?
Vidvuds Zviedris: I see creation as a single movement. Whether I work in clay, oil, or photography, it’s always about proportion, relation, rhythm. Boundaries don’t exist. For an artist, I think it’s dangerous not to embrace these wonderful transitions. My hand is recognisable; my choices are consistent. Although the medium may change, the gesture is the same. I used to think restricting myself was discipline, but it became exhaustion. I’d lost the energy of transformation. My painting process used to be more complicated. Now I let materials lead me. I’m drawn to what has lived – wood, rust, worn surfaces – things that already carry time within them. That is my personal aesthetic.
Inga Šteimane: And your method of blending abstraction with narrative?
Vidvuds Zviedris: It happens intuitively. I paint and build from instinct, but there’s always dialogue with art history, with everything I’ve seen and unlearned. I’m comfortable in this fusion. This exhibition let me speak without self-censorship or compromise. The questions are the same, but now I let them breathe.
Inga Šteimane: For those who hear an echo of the poet Ojārs Vācietis in your title – how would you describe the connection?
Vidvuds Zviedris: Poetry and art both move the psyche in ways we cannot quite predict or explain. We feel things, without knowing why or how. Vācietis’s lines don’t give clarity – they are a puzzle, a mystery that stirs and opens something in our hearts, makes space for creativity and free interpretation. I hope the viewers see that I have no intention to manipulate. What interests me is work that awakens, not instructs. If art can stir the subconscious, shift the stone inside us, that’s enough.
Inga Šteimane: Then this exhibition really is about awakening the quiet mystery of being. Thank you, Vidvuds, and let us hope the visitors have a compelling journey through the show.
Vidvuds Zviedris' solo exhibition ONCE GRASS WAS BLUE AND SKIES WERE GREEN at the Art Station “Dubulti” takes place from 24.10.2025 to 01.02.2026. The exhibition is on view every day, including weekends and holidays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free.
Public programme:
25th October, 16:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and curator Inga Šteimane, as part of the Jūrmala Autumn Guided Tour Programme
26th October, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane, as part of the Jūrmala Autumn Guided Tour Programme
9th November, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane
30th November, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane
14th December, 14:00 – Tour and conversation with artist Vidvuds Zviedris and Inga Šteimane
About the artist:
Vidvuds Zviedris (b. 1976, Rīga) studied painting at the College of Art and Design in Detroit (1995–1999). Since 2003, he has held eleven solo exhibitions at the McCormick Gallery in Chicago, including Far and Further Still (2025). Zviedris returned to Latvia in 2020. His works are held in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University, the DePaul University School of Music, the Tisch Library at Tufts University, the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the Ryerson & Burnham Library at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Library of Latvia.
About Art Station Dubulti:
For a decade, Art Station Dubulti in Jūrmala, Latvia, has stood as a quietly radical space within Europe’s cultural landscape, offering an inclusive and experimental platform for daily encounter with contemporary art. A hybrid between railway station and exhibition hall, it sustains its original purpose while extending into public culture through thoughtfully curated and profoundly stirring programmes. The station’s functional overlap, shaped by a daily rhythm of arrivals and departures, continues to guide its curatorial vision towards a layered and inclusive cultural experience. Founded and directed by art historian Inga Šteimane, Dubulti remains the only widely-known professional exhibition space in Europe operating within an active train station. Open since 2015, it keeps adding a new dimension to an iconic Socialist Modernist building conceived by St. Petersburg’s visionary architect Igor Yavein in 1977. Supported by the Jūrmala City Council and the State Culture Capital Foundation, its programme brings together artists and audiences from Latvia and beyond in an environment where art is not secluded from life but folded gently into its motion.