The exhibition Riga Notebook. Following the Lines of Wacław Szpakowski takes as its starting point the work and life of Wacław Szpakowski (1883–1973). Focusing in particular on the years he spent living and studying in Riga at the beginning of the twentieth century, the exhibition also engages other artists from different generations, placing them in dialogue with each other to form alliances across time and space and extend the different threads brought together by Szpakowski’s practice.

Wacław Szpakowski was born in Warsaw, Poland. His family moved to Riga in 1897, and he began studying architecture at the city’s Technical University in 1902. He developed a keen extracurricular interest in meteorology and studied atmospheric phenomena such as hurricanes, cyclones and storms, writing down facts and observations in his notebooks. Riga is also where he produced his oeuvre of maze-like drawings, each consisting of a single continuous line, which he would later explain in a treatise called Rhythmical Lines (1969). In 1911, soon after completing his studies, he moved back to Poland and began working as an architect and building engineer while continuing to make drawings in his spare time. Szpakowski’s work was not shown publicly until 1978, when a first exhibition was held at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź.

Szpakowski was interested in the invisible rhythms holding the world together, the glimpses of order that can be discerned in natural phenomena, and the organization of life. He ceaselessly investigated these topics during field trips, making observations that would then be translated into numerous notes and, later, drawings. The works in this exhibition display non-figurative ways of seeing, understanding, representing and engaging with the world around us. Their abstract language suggests the possibility of an alternate reality or a world beyond words — a prospect that may still seem attractive now that our everyday language, in the face of rising populism, “fake news” and a lack of political imagination, so often seems to fail us. Could there be another way to expose our presents and imagine alternative future scenarios? What are artists investigating nowadays through abstract language?

The artists in this exhibition have picked up different threads from Szpakowski’s work, interests and language and brought them to new contexts.

Artists: Wacław Szpakowski, Andrés Galeano, Navine G. Khan-Dossos, Hana Miletić, Evita Vasiļjeva, Janek Simon, Viktor Timofeev, Zanis Waldheims, Amanda Ziemele, Viktor Timofeev

Co-organiser: Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art