INGUNA GREMZDE (LV)
Inguna Gremzde performs the history laden genre of landscape painting on the insides of small plastic bottle caps. Raising questions about the future of our environment, she compresses the bigger picture into tiny ounces of detail.
The discipline of landscape painting may be as old as the history of art itself. Sometimes disregarded as outdated and cliché in recent discussion, Inguna Gremzde proves that it is far from being obsolete.
In a Turneresque manner Gremzde captures light and greenery. Her paintings show british landscapes, seemingly untouched by human civilization. But the images are miniatures and therefore condense the sujet into a small area, analoge to the shrinking that is happening to forests and wild meadows right now.
Inguna Gremzde takes a step further away from timeless depictions of romantic sceneries by choosing a contemporary framing: She places her images in the roofs of bottle caps. She started to collect these plastic pieces several years ago, giving them a life beyond their single-use-bottle-closing properties and removing them from nature.
Being found artefacts, taken from the world outside, they become a reminder of the state our planet really is in, outside of all talk about the beauty of nature. Every forest, every ocean and every meadow is somehow polluted with plastic, even if it’s not immedeately visible. Gremzdes round imageries resemble a world in which nature is trapped and compromised by human carelessness. At the same time her work is an antidote to this, since she formulates her message with greatest care, delicate brushstrokes, minimalistic material choices and attentive perceptions. While even the smallest bit of plastic is harmful, Gremzdes use of modularity, repetition and scaling also shows that a system is made up out of individuals and even the smallest change to the better can make a difference in the big picture. Gremzdes tiny worlds manage to contain one of the biggest questions of our time. She connects past and present, natural and synthetic, the big picture and the details that make it up. Over the last years, Gremzde has constantly developed her eco-artistic approach. She won the Celeste Prize twice in 2012 and 2013 and has been nominated for numerous other awards.
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