Jana Brike

Exhibition Statement

The water in all cultures has been the element of femininity, of fluidity and of the deep unconscious. In the paintings it feels tumultuous and dangerous, but the women are at peace and they are the masters of the change. I don't see the environment as external from my characters or from myself. It is a gale within their soul-space really. It cannot be deadly until one perceives it as such. My aim with "Sea of Change" was to tell a story about succession and changes in a woman's life, about different manifestations of the feminine through a walk of archetypal female and animal figures. I am a woman depicting a woman's life in its numinous quality and purpose, her movement towards her truer wilder freer self.

This change is on multiple levels - the seas and the climate are changing, our outlook on it is changing, too, to where Earth can't be taken as a resource to contemptuously deplete anymore but as a mother to love and honor. Our bodies and our personalities are changing, and through that our perception of life and self. I started my work on the concepts and ideas almost three years ago, and in these short three years while developing and working on the paintings, the world has changed also socially - the way we see a woman, how much her voice is heard and valued in the world, the way we work together as women - sisters and mothers, and daughters and grandmothers - has all changed in many ways and still changing. It is our responsibility to make that change for the better in every possible way. Bio

Jana Brike was born in year 1980 in Riga, Latvia. She has studied academical painting in the Art Academy of Latvia and received M.A. degree in year 2005. Her work has been exhibited internationally in professional venues since 1996 while she was still a young teenager, and since then she has had 13 solo exhibitions and nearly 100 other projects and group exhibitions all over the world. Her main interest is visual art with a strong narrative and depiction of a figure, mostly using the traditional medium of oil painting on canvas. She has also explored other mediums like drawing, animation, mixed media sculpture, installation and digital art. The main focus of Jana Brike's art is the internal space and state of a human soul - dreams, longing, love, pain, the vast range of emotions that human condition offers and the transcendence of them all, the growing up and self-discovery. Her work is her poetic visual auto-biography. Jana Brike has created 13 solo exhibitions and been part of nearly 100 other projects and group exhibitions in established and emerging galleries from Europe to America, to Australia and Asia for over 15 years.