Līga Purmale

Līga Purmale is a prominent figure in the Latvian art scene who has left a striking legacy with her unique and captivating paintings. She is acknowledged as one of the pioneers of photorealism in Latvia and has significantly developed landscape, still life, and figurative painting. Already during her studies, Purmale was indifferent to the dominant so-called severe style—deformed and disproportional compositions, simplified and more abstracted forms, accentuated rhythm, and a focus on color and texture in painting. She chose a different path. Her works had no place for accidental color excesses or expressive sensations. Instead, she searched for the beauty of photographic precision, striving to create painterly images closer to real life.

From her early years in Dundaga, Purmale’s artistic talent was nurtured by her mother, Vallija Purmale, a drawing teacher at Dundaga High School. Her mother’s guidance and passion for art led her to attend the Janis Rozentāls Art High School in Riga from 1961 to 1968; then, under Indulis Zariņš (1929–1997), she graduated from the Monumental Painting Department at the Teodors Zaļkalns Latvian SSR State Academy of Art in 1975 (now the Art Academy of Latvia).

In 1974, with her spouse at that time, artist Miervaldis Polis (b. 1948), Purmale embarked on an ambitious joint artistic venture. Together, they organized an exhibition at the Polygraph Club in Riga, where they unveiled their photorealist works for the first time. Purmale’s works stood out with their distinctive photo negative and solarization effects of colors. She crafted a world that seemed to be viewed through a camera lens (Self-Portrait, 1974).

Following her period of photorealism (1973–76), Purmale began to paint in nature, documenting her immediate environment from a close-up perspective. She painted interior details of her home, such as Window (1978), and fragments of her garden. Previously, she had painted from photographs. However, during this next period she painted from life, capturing her surroundings with remarkable photographic precision. In these pieces, she studied and documented the material world, including plants, different times of day, and the changing seasons, all with great sensitivity. The artworks present restrained yet emotional and attentive views, framed in a seemingly random, fragmentary manner. She created atmospherically saturated scenes. In 1978, she was accepted as a member of the Latvian SSR Artists’ Union.

In the early 1980s, Līga Purmale turned from fragmented immediate surroundings to landscape painting, discarding the perfectionist close-ups, seeking instead to depict everything exactly as it looked (Garden in the Rain, 1983, ZAM, D06131). During this period, the artist created her signature misty landscapes, capturing scenes of nature that were untouched by humans. By eliminating unnecessary elements, she made her landscapes gradually emptier, lighter, and more abstract. This approach reached its peak in the early 1990s, when mist dominated her work, revealing only vague outlines of the landscape in her paintings (Night, 1990). In these pieces, the artist aimed to evoke a sense of atmosphere, conveying a feeling of air within the artwork.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Purmale’s artwork shifted from countryside landscapes to various fragments of reality in urban settings. This was accomplished by overlapping images, merging painting planes, and incorporating urban aesthetics from a photographic viewpoint. Purmale depicted the life of the city—its rhythm; the environment of cafes, intersections, and pedestrian crossings; and members of subcultures, such as tango dancers, buskers, and graffiti artists—to create new symbols and signs in modern society. For example, in the painting series Saturday Night Cinema (1999), she focuses on problematic mass media in the contemporary world. The artist shows information and visual images relevant to our era, including familiar scenes like a sports broadcast, a military parade, and the portrayal of a TV star. The artist also includes images of pop culture stars and sports idols, such as Marilyn Monroe and Muhammad Ali.

In 2004 Purmale exhibited The Visible Worlds at the Latvian National Museum of Art. She developed a personal adaptation of photorealism, paying particular attention to elements such as lights, neon advertisements in the evening light, double reflections of glass, and the artist’s famous haze. All this is supplemented with optical effects, as if capturing a moment with a camera. Purmale’s characters do not pose; instead, they appear to have been caught in a random moment, in frozen shots of life, in which people do not even realize they are being observed.

In her solo exhibition Flashback (2012), the artist examined historical events that shaped the course of history in Latvia from the early twentieth century to 1975, when Purmale began her professional artistic career. The artist intricately embeds details such as postage stamps and her own grandmother’s address to bring the past to life. She drew inspiration from her memories, family photo albums, personal experiences, and family library books, integrating her meticulous drawings on the edges and some typical vintage press photographs. This series of paintings combines the past with the present. Through her personal experiences, the artist paints thematically and formally in her characteristic styles from various periods. Purmale’s figural compositions capture the essence of postwar society and its people, and her art reflects the hope of the 1970s and a romanticized representation of the past during the early 2000s.

Another solo show by Purmale, What’s in the Garden (Art Gallery Daugava, 2018), presented figural paintings of city environments and focused on close-ups of berries, flowers, and trees, from a butterfly’s perspective, and how they were reflected in a pond in her garden, with the play of light that she could study there.

During her career, Purmale has had more than thirty solo exhibitions and participated in group shows. Her works are held in the collections of the Museum of the Artists’ Union of Latvia and the Latvian National Museum of Art (both Riga, Latvia), Madona Local History and Art Museum (Madona, Latvia), Tukums Museum (Tukums, Latvia), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow, Russia), the Klāvs Sipoliņš Foundation (Ottawa, Canada), and the Zuzāns Collection (Riga, Latvia), as well as in private collections in Latvia and abroad. Latvian art critic and curator Vilnis Vējš, in the catalogue Līga Purmale: Redzamā pasaule [Līga Purmale: Visible World] (2004), characterizes Līga Purmale’s work: “Purmale is alone—she does not represent a group, her art cannot be contained inside a specific movement without significant loss, it is difficult to locate in it the influence of traditions, and she hardly has any followers.” [1] Purmale is like a witness or an observer of time, striving to preserve no longer existing landscapes and human existence.

Agnese Zviedre

Photo portrait: Līga Purmale, 1985. Photo by Atis Ieviņš

Notes

1. Vilnis Vējš, Līga Purmale: Redzamā pasaule [Līga Purmale: Visible World], exh. cat. (Riga: Valsts Mākslas muzejs, 2004), 5.