Frančeska Kirke

Frančeska Kirke was born into the family of poster artist Gunārs Kirke (1926–1993) and costume designer Večella Varslavāne (1930–2015); her grandfather was painter Francisks Varslavāns (1899–1950), one of the most important painters from the Latgale region in the early twentieth century. [1] She studied at the Janis Rozentāls Art High School (1968–72) and graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia (formerly the Latvian SSR State Art Academy) Monumental Painting Studio in 1978. She has participated in exhibitions since 1974 and became a member of the Artists’ Union of the Latvian SSR in 1982. During the Soviet period, in addition to her easel painting and murals, she made record album covers, worked on puppet films with Arnolds Burovs (1915–2006, the founder of Latvian puppet animation), and drew illustrations.

Kirke belongs to the generation of painters that entered the Latvian art scene in the last years of socialism. Her early works are figural compositions of various genres, stylistically combining fauvist and modernist language of form while retaining a link with realism. Over time, a more decorative expression emerged, as pictorial subjects transitioned to reflecting fragments of social reality in a grotesque, ironic manner. Without losing their painterly richness and saturation or her baroquely effective interplay of colors, chiaroscuro, and brushstrokes, her works documented the moods of the collapse of the Soviet regime, overall disorientation, and features of Soviet everyday life.

In the late 1980s Kirke began using a method that she would regularly employ in the following decades, combining realistic and academically accurate tonal painting compositions with decorative elements, creating a slightly surreal postmodernist pictorial space in which the realistic is intertwined with the abstract and purely formal. Kirke’s postmodernism is a playful yet mature game, appropriating images from the past (frequently by old masters) and visual quotations recontextualizing them. Kirke rearranges the overall composition in order to arrive at her own interpretation.

Some of the most important group exhibitions in which Kirke participated in the 1980s were Nature. Environment. Man (1984) at Saint Peter’s Church, Riga, which was one of the first manifestations of nontraditional art forms in Latvian art, as well as Post-Traditionalism, an exhibition of young Latvian painters at the Central House of Artists in Moscow (1988), which drew widespread acclaim from viewers. In the latter exhibition, the artists also dared to hang a homemade flag of the independent Latvian state; although repression and ideological surveillance eased during the last years of Soviet occupation, the idea of national independence was still utopian and the use of such symbols was very daring. Another important exhibition of Latvian artists including Kirke, Painters from Riga, took place in January 1989 in New York, at the gallery of Eduard Nakhamkin, a former resident of Riga.

In the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union, opportunities to travel abroad opened up, and the culture of Latvia and other former Soviet republics became a focus of attention in the West. Artists actively participated in exhibitions around the world as representatives of their own countries and the post-Soviet region in general. Kirke was one of the artists actively invited to exhibitions, and there was much commercial interest in her work. The unstable exchange rate of that time meant that Latvian artists enjoyed a good income amid the high inflation of the 1990s.

From the 1990s to the 2000s, Kirke’s paintings continued their dialogue with old-master works—for example, by adding fragments of other masterpieces, texts, and symbols of contemporary culture into compositions that mimicked the classics. These elements suggest a broader reflection on the relationship between art and time, art history, and art canon. Artistic reminiscences, references, and quotations appeared in Kirke’s solo exhibitions In Search of Lost Times (1995) and Private Mythology (2006) at the Riga Gallery in Riga, as well as Impossible Encounters (1998) and Appropriated Images (2000) at the Mimi Ferzt Gallery in New York, among other shows. She has received several awards from the Latvian Artists’ Union, including the Golden Medal for her solo exhibition Museum at the Latvian National Museum of Art in 2001, as well as an award for significant curatorial work for the exhibition Metropole. Riga in 2002.

In the 1990s Kirke also began to focus on photographic imagery. This included painting over old photographs and adding various visual elements to them in her characteristic style, creating new cultural and historical stories, or by painting various effects typical of digital photography—such as portraits captured in blurred focus and pixelated images. These photo-inspired works can also be interpreted as artistic investigations into the relationship between realism and mass culture and how representation, veracity, and visual transformation function in modern society.

In the late 1990s Kirke was one of the participants in the LN Women’s League collective project curated by Inga Šteimane (b. 1965), along with participating artists Ieva Iltnere (b. 1957),Kristīna Keire (b. 1968), and Silja Pogule (b. 1970). Through photography, performances, and discussions, several events explored women’s self-image and social roles. Although feminist themes are not dominant in Kirke’s paintings, the carnivalesque, performative, theatrical, and cultural-historical interpretations prevailing in the LN Women’s League project very much aligned with the mood of her paintings.

Alongside her painterly reflections on questions of medium and form, the artist sometimes also addresses current social issues, for example the theme of migrants and refugees in her solo exhibition Somebody (2017, Māksla XO Gallery) or the reflections on the Russian war against Ukraine in the exhibition Bastion (2024, Rothko Museum). Sometimes Kirke’s paintings are accompanied by installation elements, while the solo exhibition Fragile (2020) at the Art Museum RIGA BOURSE can also be described as a site-specific intervention, exhibiting replicas of classical art in a “damaged” form.

Santa Hirša

Photo portrait: Frančeska Kirke, 2015. Photo by Renārs Derrings.

Notes

1. See Anita Vanaga, Kirke’s Book (Riga: Neputns, 2015), for the art of Fračeska Kirke through the prism of the generations of her family’s artistic heritage.