From 11 July to 26 September 2026, Ola Foundation’s cultural venue will host “The Past in the Present,” an exhibition dedicated to the 85th birthday of artist Imants Lancmanis.
Anniversary exhibition ““The Past in the Present” at Ola Foundation presents a selection of conceptual works, complemented by works created over the past year. At the same time, it is also a retrospective, in which, alongside the latest works, paintings from the Latvian National Museum of Art, the Rundāle Palace Museum, the ABLV Bank art collection, and numerous private collections are exhibited.
Imants Lancmanis is one of the most outstanding and multifaceted figures in Latvian culture - a painter, art historian, public intellectual, and longtime director of the Rundāle Palace Museum. For more than half a century, through his work, erudition, and ability to share knowledge with society, he has profoundly influenced Latvia’s cultural landscape and our understanding of art, history, and cultural heritage. Alongside his contribution to the preservation of cultural heritage, painting has always remained present as well - a consistent, deeply personal, and intellectually rich dialogue about people, time, and the world.
The artist says about painting:
Painting as an art form offers an opportunity to understand the world and the meaning of life through images, to reflect life as an inner experience that also encompasses the moods of one’s surroundings and era. It allows the artist to grasp images glimpsed suddenly, offers a new view of the human form or landscape, prompts reflection on a historical event, and can even lead us to revisit the sublime, eternal messages of the New Testament. Art can be an encouragement, a reminder, a warning; it may praise good and condemn evil.
A special place in Imants Lancmanis’s oeuvre is occupied by reflection on the upheavals of his time. Bringing together two crises that have profoundly affected the world in recent years - the global pandemic and Russia’s aggression against Ukraine - the artist creates a multilayered narrative about the fragility of the modern world, humanity’s vulnerability, and the significance of human values.
Art historian Ginta Gerharde–Upeniece writes about the exhibition:
Together with Imants Lancmanis’s works, we symbolically overcome the gravity of our rational age and enter another reality that awakens within us emotional and physical memories of a supposedly earlier time or an imagined space. It is a reality where we can encounter other, forgotten vibrations, a forgotten world of human values, and which invites us to discuss and reflect on the question: what remains, and what will remain, of the world and of our age?
With the exhibition “The Past in the Present,” Ola Foundation celebrates Imants Lancmanis’s 85th birthday, honouring his multifaceted creative work and longstanding contribution to Latvian culture.
Exhibition dates: 11 July to 26 September 2026
