Starting September 5, 2026, the Ola Foundation cultural space will host “SCENES and LANDSCAPES,” an exhibition of the latest works by painter Dace Lielā, featuring works created in 2026.
In her painting, Dace Lielā consistently focuses on landscape and the depiction of nature. The artist’s works are characterized by nuanced detail and a subtle range of tones rooted in observations of nature. Although they convey nature’s immediate presence, they are not created as precise depictions of specific places. In these works, the landscape is not tied to a particular geography or time.
The artist’s source of inspiration is the surrounding environment, what she has seen and experienced, which in her paintings transforms into images of nature freed from a specific moment and place, preserved in memory. In Dace Lielā’s latest works, water - a river, pond, lake, or another body of water - becomes the central recurring motif.
Dace Lielā says of her painting:
I paint the state of water and its mood - that is how I might describe my paintings. In spring I paint autumn, in autumn - summer, in winter - spring, and all the while it is wonderful. Light, materiality, and the eternal changes in nature are what I try to grasp visually.
Art historian Diāna Barčevska characterizes Dace Lielā’s painting as concise and restrained. The artist avoids pathos and a romanticized view of nature, focusing instead on seemingly ordinary Latvian landscapes. Tonal painting, color, and atmosphere are essential in her works.
Dace Lielā has succeeded in creating a distinctive canon of the contemporary Latvian landscape - a visual space in which viewers recognize their own living environment and their connection to it. The artist’s untamed landscapes preserve the character of Latvia’s nature while simultaneously transforming it into a generalized image.
In 2019, Dace Lielā was nominated for the Purvītis Prize for her series “Floodwaters” in the exhibition “Paintings.” The nomination statement highlighted the artist’s ability to transform fragmentary natural aesthetics into a unified narrative and to bring awareness of nature as an essential value to the fore.
About the artist
Dace Lielā (1957) graduated from the Jānis Rozentāls Riga Art High School and the Painting Department of the Art Academy of Latvia, as well as Indulis Zariņš’s Monumental Painting Studio and Professor Eduards Kalniņš’s master studio. Her works are held in the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art, the collection of the Artists’ Union of Latvia, the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey, and private collections in Latvia and abroad.