Works of Latvian Kinetic Art Shown in Global Context in an Exhibition for the First Time

In collaboration with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, the ambitious exhibition The Other Trans-Atlantic. Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1950s – 1970s has been opened in Garage, one of the most important museums of contemporary art in Moscow. It also includes works by Latvian artists Valdis Celms, Jānis Krievs and Artūrs Riņķis – their functional and visionary proposals for the urban space of Riga as well as kinetic installations.

This is the first exhibition of a global context to include works of Latvian kinetic art from the 1970s, part of them coming from the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art. It follows several years of research and exhibitions of kinetic art by the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art.

Solvita Krese, director of the LCCA, comments: “Thanks to art historian Ieva Astahovska's research and work with our archive of contemporary art, we have shown and popularised Latvian kinetic art as a previously little-known achievement in contemporary art, which is now also being recognised in the international arena of contemporary art.” 

The exhibition includes Valdis Celms' recently reconstructed installation Rotating Cylinders, which was first shown by the artist in the earliest exhibition of Latvian kinetic art, Festival, in 1972 and whose motif he has interpreted in many other works, photomontages and visionary yet realisable objects for the urban environment. 

The ambitious exhibition The Other Trans-Atlantic shows more than one hundred kinetic sculptures, installations, paintings, drawings and films as well as unique archival materials from such East-European and Latin American art centres as Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Bucharest, Moscow, Riga, Tallinn, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo. The works of Latvian artists are exhibited alongside such legends of kinetic art as Fracisko Infante-Arana, Lygia Clark, Kaarel Kurismaa, Viacheslav Koleichuk, Milan Dobeš, Oskar Hansen, Oskar Hansen, Lev Nusberg, Helio Oiticica, Abraham Palatnik, Ludmila Popiel, Jesus Rafael Soto, Aleksandar Srnec, Henryk Stażewski, Victor Vasarely.