Arthur Nikitin is an outstanding Latvian painter, graphic artist, and professor, whose name is well known in many countries, including Russia, the USA, as well as in Europe. In the 1960s, he graduated from the Academy of Arts in Riga. He has held about 700 exhibitions, 100 of them were personal. Throughout his career, Arthur Nikitin worked in the techniques of drawing, etching, lithography, linocut, woodcut, watercolours, pastel, silk-screen printing. He has been engaged in easel painting, sculpture, murals and design.
However, Arthur Nikitin is mostly known as a portraitist, who created about 5000 portraits of his contemporaries: ordinary workers, fishermen, representatives of “common” occupations and prominent figures of culture, art and social activities, including Vladimir Vysotsky, Edita Piekha, Tatyana Vasilyeva, Mikhail Kazakov, Sergey Yurskiy, Raimonds Pauls, Mikhail Tal, Rasul Gamzatov, Joseph Brodsky and other famous and conspicuous figures.
The current exhibition – “Vivace Con Affetto” bears the Italian name of a musical tempo and is translated into English as “Lively with passion”. It clearly reflects the creativity of the maestro and his constant desire to move forward; try something new. As the master says about himself: “I was always shackled by conventionality, and I have become a pioneer in many respects. Deep inside, every true artist is a fighter with traditional ideals of the time in which he is living. An artist creates his own reality, his own world, while every age tries to build up and strengthen the tradition in which it is easier to keep and consolidate its power and ideology. Including in art.”
“Some of my recent works – the series “Omuпi” – are named after the farmstead where we have a house. I only moved over to such naturally representational art this summer. I am trying it out of curiosity. There is something existential in this art. For example, the “Doors”: along with a piece of horse collar and ploughshare, I have attached a dried piece of skin, which I found and painted, to a fragment of an old wooden barn door…,” the artist told one of the Latvian portals shortly before the opening of the exhibition in the Rietumu gallery.
The works of the artist are stored in the collections of the Art Museum and the Art Fund in Riga; the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the State Russian Museum and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, as well as in a number of other museums and countless private collections.
The exhibition will be open until 16 September; opening hours – from 9:00 to 18:00 on weekdays. Entry is free as usual.
Location: central office of the Rietumu Capital Centre bank, Riga, 7 Vesetas Street.
The general sponsor of the competitions is traditionally Rietumu Bank.