10/23/2026
Jana Brike's surrealistic paintings can be mysterious, evocative, and deliberately confusing all at the same time. The paintings invite you to feel before you think. This new body of work, called In Between Worlds suggest transformation, and turn the familiar into something uncanny. By occcupying a place In Between Worlds the paintings suggest an inner journey, and the uncanny feeling that a dream contains a truth that cannot be put into words.
Viewed through American eyes, Jana Brike’s paintings might look naive. But what could be perceived as an innocent simplicity is actually a pronounced embrace of the power of the female.
In pre-Christian Latvian belief, much of the sacred world is feminine. Māra is the great mother figure, associated with the earth, livestock, the household, and women's concerns. Zemes māte (Earth Mother) is the soil itself, to whom the dead return and from whom crops grow. Jāņi, at midsummer, is explicitly a fertility festival. Women wear flower wreaths and men oak-leaf wreaths, and the night is full of songs with earthy, joking sexual overtones. Consequently, Brike’s women lying among the flowers are not merely surrounded by them; they are an actual part them, as though they belong to the beauty of nature itself.
Jana Brike lives in Riga, Latvia and was trained from an early age at Soviet art schools. She combines Latvian folklore with the Western imagery that was forbidden during the Soviet occupation of her childhood. This collection of figurative paintings and drawings shows Brike as a unique and distinctive voice in figurative art that celebrates not only the female figure but Latvian culture, folk art, and mythology.
Shown: The Alchemist in Her Garden, oil on canvas, 35 ½ x 35 ½”, 90 x 90 cm.
