Automation, Synth Folklore, and a Polish starchitect come together in a Riga exhibition

An exhibition of the avant-garde 20th century Polish architect Wacław Szpakowski, as well as eight European contemporary artists pursuing abstraction, opens in Riga on 23 October.

Riga Notebook. Following the Lines of Wacław Szpakowski is co-organised by the Sztuki Łódź Museum and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art. The show features the artist’s emblematic ink drawings, known for employing only one line which would never intersect itself.

Born in Warsaw, Szpakowski (1883-1973) studied architecture in the Latvian capital, where he first conceived his drawings in early 1900s sketchbooks. Calling his works “drawings of linear ideas,” the architect pursued a modernist approach to art via his systematic exploration of geometry and universal laws.

Among the contemporary artists in the show, one outstanding contribution is by Polish artist Janek Simon, whose work, Synthetic Folklore, consists of abstract mosaics made with AI-generated algorithms from folk motifs from across the world, in a bid to promote universal forms as a way of fighting xenophobia. Other tech-inspired works include Croatian artist Hana Miletić’s soothing jacquard-woven textile, which references the history of automatisation in the textile industry, Greek artist Navine G. Khan-Dossos’s striking visualisation of the colour codes used for printing, and Andrés Galeano’s use of meteorological glass plate negatives from the first, inter-war Catalan Meteorological Service.

Riga Notebook. Following the Lines of Wacław Szpakowsi is running from 23 October to 28 February. You can find more information here.