From March 1 to June 30, the Ola Foundation will host an exhibition by textile artist Edīte Pauls-
Vīgnere, in which her work will be accompanied by assemblages created by her son, Pauls Vīgners.
Edīte Pauls-Vīgnere is one of the most striking and appealing figures of the Latvian art scene of the
second half of the 20 th century. Her creativity, expression, narratives, multi-layeredness, ambition
and formal innovation have left their mark far beyond the strictly defined genre boundaries of
textile art (although she is closely associated with the processes that underpinned the establishment
of the Textile Art department at the Art Academy of Latvia in 1961, an event that made the textile
medium a significant presence in the Latvian art space). She is a significant and brilliant
phenomenon in the history of Latvian visual art. In today's context, with textile art being back in the
spotlight, Edīte’s boundless creativity and her hands’ ability to create energetically charged, multi-
layered objects and images confirm her status of superiority. She is comparable in importance to
another artist from Eastern Europe, Magdalena Abakanowicz from Poland (whose exhibition, as
Edith recalls, she rushed to see at what was then called the Museum of Border Art in Riga), who is
admired by today's European art circles.
Edīte continues to work creatively, the only difference being that her once gigantic formats have
sublimated into more concentrated volumes. Today she no longer sits at the huge loom made by her
father – which was designed to make no noise, no clattering – so that Edith could listen to music
while ‘in the process’. Now she spends her nights at the table she inherited from her mother –
gluing, sewing, fixing, folding... The table is loaded with beads, glass, lace, scraps of cloth, candy
wrappers...an almost unimaginable array of objects and trinkets. A little girl's dream playground.
‘Just don't throw the wrappers out,’ she instructs us as we treat ourselves to sweets. She is still
playful, sparkly, and finds peace in listening to Sufi music and watching the dervishes whirling on
her monitor. ‘Age is at play,’ says Edith with a smile – the title of the exhibition is her idea, as it
most accurately captures the feeling she is living and experiencing right now.
The starting point of the exhibition was the desire to discover a lesser-known facet of Edīte Pauls-
Vīgnere – to steer the viewer away from Edīte's customary artistic narrative, one in which we see at
work popular images that are familiar to so many from their childhood and youth. The two-storey
exhibition at the Ola Foundation partly continues the retrospective element so familiar and
customary in the context of Edīte’s solo exhibitions, giving the viewer the opportunity to see three
of her earliest works – Invasion, Tropics and Apocalypse. Yet these ghouls, snakes and butterflies
that bulge out far beyond the two-dimensional plane – works that do not allow for them to be
directly and clearly defined, and that balance on the edge between moulding, tapestry, assemblage
and object – are perhaps not what we associate with the ‘usual’ Edith.
‘My works are nothing but my experiences.’ They can be travel notes, moments of emotional highs,
socio-political events, and even grief. The passing of her son Pauls Vīgners, aka Uli, was a hard
blow. It was to him that Edith would turn to for advice when she wanted to talk about her work, and
she always appreciated the value of his remarks. He studied music, but at Edīte’s urging, turned to
assemblage, in which he then integrated another of his passions: radio chips.
Age at Play has been architecturally designed as an exhibition on two levels, where on each storey
the viewer enters a ‘core’ – being among Edīte's works and surrounded by a ‘shell’, i.e. things that
have happened, and are happening, around her. The ‘shell’ of the historical works is composed of
photographs taken by Jānis Kreicbergs in 1978: Edīte, magically witch-like, weaving, ironing, and
dyeing yarn like a fireball, whereas the ‘shell’ of the present works are Pauls Vīgners’ assemblages
– they are constantly with Edīte in her Art-Nouveau flat with wine-coloured walls, where in her
workroom she sits at a round table throughout the night, creating imprints of her emotions. Never
call her before three in the afternoon. She likes the dark and the night – saturated silence, with no
unnecessary noises.
Curated by Daiga Rudzāte and Una Meistere
Graphic design by Kirils Kirasirovs
Exhibition designer – Martins Vizbulis
The exhibition is a collaboration between the culture and art portal Arterritory.com and the Ola
Foundation
