Solvita Zāle’s solo exhibition “Conversations over Coffee” features a series of the artist’s latest works, specially created for the Riga Porcelain Museum. It is accompanied by a small retrospective selection of the artist’s older works. “I opted for a minimalist aesthetic for the composition of pieces. I applied both the rigour of design forms and a free approach to the creation of form,” says the artist. The circle, the hemisphere and the rectangle are the three key shapes which have been present throughout Solvita Zāle’s oeuvre, and which are now being used as a compositional code in her latest works for the exhibition “Conversations over Coffee”.

Solvita Zāle’s first contact with porcelain (1942) was both at the Riga School of Applied Arts (now Riga School of Design and Art) and at the Ceramics Department of the Latvian SSR State Academy of Art (now the Art Academy of Latvia) under the tutelage of Professor Georgs Kruglovs, an outstanding ceramicist and a trailblazer of industrial design in ceramics. A budding artist at the time, she even chose porcelain for her diploma thesis, designing form moulds for a dinner service in 1968. The aforementioned mould is currently in the collection of the Riga Porcelain Museum.

Solvita Zāle’s creative work is more associated with other ceramic materials: clay, chamotte and stoneware. She worked in the Ceramics Workshop of the LSSR Art Foundation, and has been active in the ceramics studio “Logs” and the Ķīpsala Ceramics Workshop. She has been a resident at Dzintari Creative House multiple times and has exhibited her works in Latvia and abroad, in Poland, France, Italy and elsewhere. Solvita Zāle’s artworks can be found in museum collections and in private collections.

For her solo exhibition “Conversations over Coffee”, the artist has returned to porcelain and is experimenting with the technological possibilities it has to offer. Working with tinted porcelain – white, blue and dark brown porcelain body – has proved particularly exciting. Various functional as well as decorative elements have been created free-hand. The surface of the objects is left unglazed in some places in order to highlight the beauty of the material, while in other places it is painted with silver and gold in a minimalist way, as well as decorated with surface incisions: engravings and impressions. The artist’s work is characterised by elegance and scrupulous attention to surface treatment, thoughtful colour combinations and subtle details in decoration.

The exhibited works have been created with the financial support of the State Culture Capital Foundation.

Photo by Gvido Kajons.