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Common Issues in Painting and Everyday Life – Content. Outsider

Common Issues in Painting and Everyday Life – Content. Outsider

Oil on canvas, zipper
300 × 448 cm
2024
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Introduction

Elīna Vītola’s practice is relational, using art as a communicator to investigate values, crafts, identities and histories. The artist approaches colours, objects and painting as a whole in a conceptual way, pitching humorous questions about its subject matter, technique and material. Her works are often curious, funny and visually challenging, playing with painting in the most diverse situations. This work is no exception. The large-scale interactive painting with a zipper explores what it means to enter the space of the artwork as well as cleverly scatters footprints of the artist’s previous creative projects. Arranged in a site-specific manner, the painting urges the audience to explore it in performative ways while uncovering its possible meanings and messages.

Elīna Vītola likes to explore the representation of certain imagery through abstraction. This method has been implemented in various ways, including in the 2017 personal exhibition at Kogo Gallery where she named it crapstraction, a synonym for Zombie Formalism, which characterises the revival of abstractionism. Through the years, Vītola has continued to document her creative journey by incorporating fragments of it in newer works.

About the artist

Elīna Vītola (b. 1986) is an artist based in Riga. Her conceptual and visually vibrant work varies from paintings to complex communal installations involving several other artists and creative practitioners. Classically trained as a painter at the Art Academy of Latvia (BA and MA), Vītola has taken up this medium as a companion in her artistic journey to disentangle some issues that are connected with her identity as an artist and the art world in general and to build new platforms for other artists. She has worked both as an artist and as a curator in organisations such as the Monumental Cafe and Low Gallery in Riga.

Vītola has participated in exhibitions at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Tallinn Art Hall, Kadriorg Art Museum in Tallinn, the University of Tartu Art Museum, Kogo Gallery in Tartu and P/////AKT in Amsterdam.
In 2018, she received the Nordic & Baltic Young Artist Award and in 2021 was shortlisted for the Purvītis Prize.

Her works are in the collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art and the European Patent Office Collection.

More works by this artist

Installation: sofa, rolled up painting, oil on canvas, 210 × 2000 cm cm, 2018
Mural on the wall in acrylic ink, industrial alcyd on canvas panel, 2017-2018
Pigment fused on glass, 200 x 100 cm, 2023
Pigment fused on glass, 200 x 100 cm, 2023
Pigment fused on glass, 200 x 100 cm, 2023
Blown glass, modified perfume, 10 x 10 x 13 cm, 2023
Sublimation prints on performance fabric, showcase frame, 2/5+1AP, 50 × 40 × 6 cm, 2024
Sugar cookies, sugar glaze, showcase frame, 50 × 40 × 6 cm, 2024
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Mixed industrial paints and natural substances on a two-seat rowing boat, 250 × 140 × 40 cm, 2024
Bronze minimonuments, 8 unique works, 2024
Bronze minimonument on plaster cast of classical sculpture, 35.5 × 14.5 × 22.5 cm, 2024
Bronze minimonuments on plaster cast of classical sculpture, 35.5 × 14.5 × 22.5 cm, 2024
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Bronze minimonument on plaster cast of classical sculpture, 23.4 × 16 × 15 cm, 2024
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Bronze minimonuments on plaster cast of classical sculpture, 23.4 × 16 × 15 cm, 2024
Sublimation prints on performance fabric, showcase frame , 153 × 53 × 5 cm, 2024
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