Jānis Avotiņš

To kick off its 55th anniversary year, Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle is delighted to present Latvian artist Jānis Avotiņš in his eighth solo exhibition. Atmospherically dense, his mysterious paintings reveal cinematographic sceneries with contemplative figures embedded in natural, architectural, or void settings. Appearing alongside his usual subtle paintings are more concrete and multicolored works.

Jānis Avotiņš’s paintings take us to a temporal and spatial vacuum, a state of suspension. Timeless and time-specific, indeterminate and multivalent, real and imagined aspects of reality seem to coalesce in diffuse colors and lighting, while the pictorial spaces oscillate between resolution and clear composition. The special, category-defying sense of temporality and space is also conveyed through the integration of the canvas texture, where pigments seem to have been caught as if by a light breeze. The painterly light appears to elude the laws of physics in its omnipresence and direction, acting as an autonomous and overpowering element that runs like a thread through the artist’s œuvre.

Jānis Avotiņš was born in Riga in 1981 and has presented his works in numerous solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally. Currently, his works can be seen in the exhibition “Archaeologists of Memory: Vitols Contemporary Art Collection” at the Kumu Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn until April 2023. In 2016, he received the Prix Jean-Francois Prat, in conjunction with which his works were shown at Palais de Tokyo in Paris. Avotiņš is represented in private and public collections worldwide, including the Rubell Family Collection, the Cranford Collection, the Hort Family Collection, the François Pinault Collection, the Saatchi Collection, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, and the Collection of Contemporary Art of the Federal Republic of Germany. Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle has been showing Jānis Avotiņš since the beginning of his career—his first solo exhibition as early as 2005.