Porcelain Window Display: “Decoratively Beyond”
24.01–18.05.2025
Can be viewed from the street, every day.
The exhibition “Decoratively Beyond” is a conceptual and visual response of the decorative arts from the Zuzāns collection to the exhibition “Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė”. It offers an opportunity to observe how, in various ways, it was and still is possible to go beyond the conventional in decorative arts.
The question of frames and boundaries blends visually and thematically, looking at different ways of going beyond – formally, in relation to material and medium, ideologically, and in the form of the exhibition itself. At the same time, some work can also raise the question of where and how going beyond happens.
Exhibited industrially produced objects and original works have been created by artists from Latvia and neighboring countries from the Soviet era to the present day. Specific periods or works can be placed in the exposition context for some of the artists, but it is the creative norm for others. Each work is a witness to its era and simultaneously reveals ways of adapting to the existing present or going beyond the conventional.
The Soviet era, with its restrictions on artistic expression, forced creative personalities to look for ways in which the creative spirit could express itself or at least survive, leaving the painful subject. This has left its imprint on all forms of art ever since. The works on display reveal a going “beyond” through defiance, stylisation-abstraction, perfection, and touching on the theme – beyond what is tangibly visible.
The works of the three artists in ‘Unframed’ open up new interpretative horizons for each other and, at the same time, for the works of decorative and applied art in the Zuzāns collection, allowing them to be seen from the point of view of otherness in the overall picture of “tangible art”.
Applied art is always a game with space, color, compositional elements, scale, and materiality. It involves the interplay of works with one another, which opens new possibilities for the visual perception of decorative objects.
Contexts of the exhibited objects
In the works of the Porcelain window display, several departures beyond can be read:
defiance – more or less openly challenging the existing order, with which we are not at peace, is the first and most natural way (Skuja Braden, Kris Lemsalu)
stylization-abstraction allows us to say through flowers what we really think, assuming that it may not be perceptible to everyone (Tatjana Krivenkova, Ilga Dreiblate – in some works stylization in geometry)
perfection – detailed immersion in one’s permitted task is the last – reconciliation with the situation.
The exhibited works by Riga Porcelain Factory artists Beatrise Kārkliņa, Ilga Dreiblate, Maija Zagrebajeva, Zina Ulste show various motifs that could be decoratively developed within the permitted themes – Kārkliņa’s detailed, delicate and artisanally precise decorative motifs with reference to the allowed national theme within the framework of flora; Dreiblate’s plates with roosters and bird-like themes are solved in faunal images. Zagrebajeva’s realistic rose paintings and Ulste’s airy decorative vase demonstrate elaborate, romantic decorativism as well as escapism in nature.
Touches on the theme – beyond the tangible (Valda Podkalne, Helga Ingeborga Melnbārde, Laura Põld) – everyone has their own spiritual refuge when the material world is not enough or is too much. Included in works of art, the artist’s spiritual space can sometimes reach others.
The meeting points of Latvia & Estonia in applied decorative art are represented by the cup and saucer painted in the workshop “ARS Tallin” and the Baiba Rass dessert ware set.
During the Soviet era, in the Porcelain Painting Workshop “ARS Tallin” of the Art Products Production Combine (KFK – Kunstifondi kunsittoodete kombinadaid), individual artists continued the artistic painting of tableware from various manufacturers, including the Riga Porcelain Factory, begun already in the 1920s.
Ceramist Baiba Rass graduated from the Ceramics Department of the Estonian State Art Institute (currently the Estonian Academy of Arts, 1983), developing an extensive tableware set as her diploma work, part of which – the exhibited dessert plate set – was included in the range of tableware produced by the 1st section of the Riga Porcelain Factory in the late 1980s.
Represented artists and factories:
Beatrise Kārkliņa, Ilga Dreiblate, Zina Ulste, Maija Zagrebajeva (Riga Porcelain Factory, 1970s–1990s), Baiba Rasa (Riga Porcelain Factory and Estonian State Art Institute, 1970s–1980s), Porcelain Painting Workshop “ARS Tallin” (Estonia), Laura Põld (Peldaru) (Estonia), Skuja Braden, Valda Podkalne, Tatjana Krivenkova, Kris Lemsalu (Estonia), Helga Ingeborga Melnbārde.
Author of porcelain window display: Marta Šuste
Zuzāns Collection curator of decorative arts and design