The Green Gallery and MISAKO & ROSEN are thrilled to co-present six Latvian artists alongside Tokyo-based artists COBRA and C&K at this year's Riga Contemporary, running July 2–5 at Hanzas Perons. Since 2023 we've made visits to Riga and frequented the studios of Amanda Ziemele, Ēriks Apaļais, Indriķis Ģelzis, Kaspars Groševs, Maija Kurševa, and Viktor Timofeev, and this week we're debuting new work by C&K alongside them. Find us at booth 1.12.
This constellation grew out of studio visits to Riga that Kim? Contemporary Art Centre helped organize, and the friendships that followed. Amanda Ziemele — winner of the Purvītis Prize and Latvia's representative at the 60th Venice Biennale — treats painting as a performative, spatial act, building installations that migrate across floors, walls, and ceilings with an underlying wit. Ēriks Apaļais is one of the most original painters to emerge from Latvia in recent years; his signature monochrome fields crowded with floating figures, letters, and memory fragments produce paintings that, in his words, "oscillate between the seeable and the readable." Maija Kurševa, co-founder of the Riga Zine Festival and included in Phaidon's Vitamin D3: Today's Best in Contemporary Drawing, extends drawing as a daily, almost meditative practice into spatial installation. Kaspars Groševs moves fluidly across painting, sound, and curatorial work; co-founder of the artist-run 427 Gallery, his recent paintings are faintly psychedelic, built by hand through pressure and repetition, figures hovering somewhere between playful and sinister. Viktor Timofeev, based between Riga and New York, constructs semi-fantastical environments across painting, video, installation, and software; his most extensive solo show to date, Other Passengers, recently closed at the Latvian National Museum of Art to significant critical attention. Indriķis Ģelzis works in a process-based mode where each piece grows from the one before it; his commissioned public sculpture Gaze Grows Bones is currently on view in downtown Milwaukee, presented by Sculpture Milwaukee in collaboration with Kim? Contemporary.
COBRA presents Story of Eggs (Bird Gallery for Birds), small paintings of eggs nestled inside birdcages with straws and feathers, proposing a fictional avian audience for his work. Romantic and a little absurd, the series embodies COBRA's ongoing interest in the comedic contradictions hidden within both art history and everyday life. C&K, the collaborative unit of COBRA and Ken Kagami, two of Tokyo's most wry artistic voices, makes its Latvian debut at Riga Contemporary. Dieting Together presents the pair in choreographed workout poses, photographed with deadpan commitment at a classic Asakusa photo studio, turning the annual C&K studio session into its own running performance.
We look forward to seeing you in Riga this week.
Location
Hanzas Perons
Hanzas iela 16A
Vidzemes priekšpilsēta
Rīga, Latvia
Dates and Hours
Thursday, July 2, 7-9pm
Friday, July 3, 11am-7pm
Saturday, July 4, 11am-7pm
Sunday, July 5, 11am-7pm