Inga Meldere
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1979
Latvia
Temnikova & Kasela
Inga Meldere
(b. 1979, Kuldiga, Latvia)
lives and works in Helsinki, Finland.
Meldere's work has been described as being essentially about the practices of art in general, as well as about painting and image-making methods in particular. Like the properties of human memory, Meldere’s work is utterly ambivalent – her paintings perturb as much as they exhilarate, combining a sense of belonging, art historical quotes and everyday imagery.
All her paintings, installations, prints and daily watercolours or drawings are the result of elaborately detailed working and re-working processes with varied source materials, found images and numerous interconnected references – i.e. art historical quotes and motifs, archival material, and quotidian cultural imagery from her youth in the 1990's.
Meldere studied at the University of Latvia and at the Art Academy of Latvia. She was a researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht between 2013 and 2014. In 2021 she graduated the MA programme in painting at the University of the Arts in Helsinki.
Her recent solo exhibitions include Bluetooth (Sister N.), at Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn (2022); Hidden matter, with Mikko Hintz, at Helsinki Contemporary (2019) and Vertex, at SIC space, Helsinki (2017); while also participating in group exhibitions such as Archaeologists of Memory: Vitols Contemporary Art Collection, at Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn (2022-23) and the inaugural Helsinki Biennial titled The Same Sea (2021).
– New Body of Work for Liste Art Fair Basel 2023 –
In her new series of works, Meldere’s original digital collages, that were initially printed on textile, have been re-worked into paintings, which were inspired by the switching of modes in-between internet browsing, cultural sightseeing and physical book reading; and were also shaped in a wider sense by issues concerning social history and by the problematics surrounding the Anthropocene.
The works are typically finalised with various methods and techniques, turning the appropriated found images of historical paintings, together with her own photos and personal imagery, into distorted collage-like surfaces, that often bear traces of typographical errors and visual glitches.
Having previously been educated as a restorer and a conservator, Meldere freely handles the fragments of the past and present with necessary precision, folding them delicately into bizarre kaleidoscopes which function through poetic understatement and halftones.
– earlier works & previous exhibitions – from 2016 to 2022
2022 – Bluetooth (Sister N.), at Temnikova & Kasela in Tallinn, Estonia
Through her series of paintings (and an object) titled Bluetooth (Sister N.), we delve into an imaginary dialogue between the artist and her colleague from a thousand years ago. And we learn the following: the divine particle found in the tartar of Sister N is a piece of ultramarine. A pigment which was once worth its weight in gold, until the 19th century it could only be extracted from the semi-precious rock lapis lazuli.
[…]
Meldere’s painting stands out by its subtlety. The see-through layers of paint, silhouettes of objects, bodies or letters made with the lightest touch, and plenty of empty or abstract backgrounds, create an abundance of space for the thoughts to wander, even in the smallest of her paintings. In Bluetooth (Sister N.), the subtlety reaches the point of Grace: so light are the brushstrokes, so elevating, that they seem to oscillate between presence and absence.
[excerpts from Neringa Černiauskaitė’s review at echogonewrong.com]
'Margins', installation: metal table, plexiglass, silkscreen on paper, plaster object, self made pigments from plants; painting: UV-print, acrylic, oil and pigment on canvas, 250x190cm, 2017–2022. [Photo by Ansis Starks]
2021 – Repeating Pattern and Swimming School, at the Helsinki Biennial on Vallisaari, Finland
When exploring stories about life on Vallisaari island during the decades when Gilles Deleuze wrote down his thoughts about islands, one can see recurring characteristics in them. Attention is drawn to the island’s underaged residents, the children. Memories of childhood summers and winters have, in a way, preserved the time lived on the island.
Separated by decades, the stories of the island’s children – the descendants of Suomenlinna’s shipbuilders, armed forces, their servants, and the pilot house residents – echo the same joys, and fears: simple meals of fish, potatoes, and crisp-bread in the poor residents’ modest rooms, always at the same time; and the lake swimming lessons where, to pass the final test successfully, one had not only to swim forward and backward, on one’s back and belly, but also jump and dive into the lake’s depths.
[excerpt from the exhibition text]
2019 – Brownie from Bruņinieku Street, at microRIBOCA in Riga, Latvia
Inga Meldere’s work Brownie from Bruņinieku Street, a monumental painting on the façade of an early 19th-century building, dedicated by the artist to the history and restoration of Riga’s wooden architecture as well as a dialogue with people involved in street art and graffiti, was also the opening work of RIBOCA's inter-season programme microRIBOCA.
Brownie is a term coined by Rigans for uninhabited wooden houses in historical neighbourhoods where only the façades are kept up. A brown floor paint, as the cheapest and best-loved option, makes these abandoned buildings even more strikingly sad.
Both in the city centre and the historic neighbourhoods, the brownies bring to the forefront the issue of the unused potential of the memories encapsulated by urban cultural space.
[excerpt from a text by curator Kaspars Vanags]
'Brownie from Bruņinieku street', at microRIBOCA, in Riga, Latvia, 2019. [Photo by Alexey Koshkin]
2017 – Vertex, at SIC space in Helsinki, Finland
When asked to write something about Inga Meldere´s recent work, I decided that I wanted to write about transparency – a term which is very much in vogue, but I didn’t mind.
[…]
Somewhere I read about two kinds of transparency; one is where an inner structure is revealed; the other is where two or more things are perceived simultaneously, contradicting themselves. None of these two transparencies interest me.
[…]
I step forward, a figure beholds something on her left while moving towards her right, she is just looking, with her eyes, not looking at us but gazing just above where sight becomes aimless. The renaissance landscapes in the vitrines (or within it, behind it, barely visible), mountains and cliffs, valleys and ravines where to hide or simply fall asleep. Territories inhabited by a crowd that moves along, fragmented in its own choreography. Sometime there’s a castle or a palace with statues on top of a hill, more often just a concavity in which to rest from a difficult journey or an endless conversation. A blubbering that is nothing but the sound of language coming from the paintings inhabitants.
[excerpts from the exhibition text by Stefano Faoro]
'Vertex', UV-print, acrylics and oil on primed canvas, 210x175cm, 2017. [Photo by Tuomas Linna]
– Series of concrete Artefacts for Liste Art Fair Basel 2016
With these speculative restoration works that are presented as a series of semi-figurative almost-sculptural concrete artefacts, Meldere’s background of having been taught as a restorer is vividly foregrounded.
Bits of 'uncovered' frescoes and murals in places where they never existed have been constructed by Meldere from scratch, giving an impression of unveiled architectural structures or artefacts that appear to be ripped out, overpainted and re-decorated.
As her work often deals with juxtaposing art history with local contexts, these delicate findings reveal fictional histories of European modernism, Futurism and Russian Avant-Garde, completing the surreal urban narrative of the presentation with pieces of neglected street culture.
'Artefact with a worker at rest', acrylics & plaster on concrete, 38x25x4cm, 2016.
