The exhibitions are on view from this weekend until May 21.
The painter Jacques Shapiro, whose real name is Jakov Shapiro, was born in Daugavpils during the Russian Empire. In 1925, he moved to France and joined the Paris artists’ colony The Hive (Spiets), where the XX century 20-30 such future artistic geniuses as Modigliani, Picasso, Chagall and Léger lived and worked in the 1970s. Together, they formed the so-called Paris school, but Shapiro managed to create his own unique world of art with unusual shapes and bright colors. Exhibition curated by the Rothko Center Arrival: Jacques Shapiro has been made in cooperation with the US art collector Shmuel Tatz, confirming the important place of the artist in the history of world art and reminding of his origin.
The interest of the curators of the Rothko Center in Jacques Shapiro’s work began when they had the opportunity to supplement the center’s collection with two of his originals and exhibit one of them in the exhibition of the collection Found in the collection. In the spring season, a new exhibition of the collection, A Reasonable Being, will be on display, highlighting other art pearls found in the Rothko Center’s collection.
This year, the exhibition of the Latgale region artist competition goes by the name Hit the top ten because it is being held for the tenth time and is the beginning of the Rothko Center’s ten-year anniversary celebration. The works of 48 artists were selected for the exhibition in accordance with the competition, which, according to the jury’s assessment, prophetically “hit the top ten” without any external or internal censorship restrictions and with the intellectual impulses available to the artist.
Polish artist Piotr Skovron in the exhibition of abstract representational graphics, Interferences, devotes himself to a creative and experimental exploration of space, which he was inspired by the engineering sciences he once learned.
On the other hand, Australian photographer and artist Ralfs Kerle explores the waterways of Sydney Harbor in his exhibition The Untouchable Sublimity in photography. The author records the formations observed in nature and created by nature, conceptually processing them into an abstract art photograph. The work of the French photographer Uriel Morgenstern is also rooted in abstraction and interest in architecture. He is fascinated by the use of light and the deeply reflective properties of black in the works of artists Mark Rothko and Pierre Soulages. The exhibition About Rothko and Suláž: The Color of Silence marks the points of mutual contact in the works of Rothko, Suláž and Morgenstern.