Krista Vindberga-Auzniece
Circles Are Better Than Lines (oda pieskārienam)
solo exhibition
Opening: August 26, 6-9 p.m.
Exhibition dates: August 27–October 18, 2026
Venue: Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Sporta 2, Riga
Curator: Zane Onckule
I don’t remember any of it, and yet I still seem to have memories of it.
Krista Vindberga-Auzniece
The body remembers through touch. The new drawings made especially for Krista Vindberga-Auzniece’s solo exhibition emerge through repetition, silence, and concentration, with one movement slowly following the next until time accumulates in the surface. Charcoal crumbles, slips from the control of the hand, and is worked into the carefully prepared canvas; each subsequent touch retains the trace of the one before, turning duration into a material quality of the image.
Vindberga-Auzniece’s particular sensitivity, a heightened sense of presence akin to falling in love or some other intoxicating state, meets images from a time that belonged to others. Old family albums become starting points for prolonged looking, where a smile, a hand on a shoulder, a dance step, a fold of fabric or flowers held with ceremonial seriousness acquire a new kind of attention, bringing peripheral details into focus.
The contours of these drawings on canvas and paper grew out of this meditative rhythm, in which movement becomes a form of contemplation. The artist’s hand is at once an instrument, a measuring device, and a bearer of memory. The drawing takes on sculptural contours, its surface holding the pressure of the palm, the imprints of fingers and movements causing persistent friction, pushed to the point of drawing blood, leaving the artist’s body legible within the image.
The photographic source material comes from the artist’s personal archive: faded black-and-white and sepia images of lives past. Enlarged, sometimes hundreds of times, these images shift in weight and meaning as the scale redistributes attention. The miniature acquires mass and a musculature of meaning; the passing moment gains permanence, while an unfamiliar gesture or posture becomes strangely recognisable.
Images fixed long before the artist’s birth enter a field in which personal and collective memory overlap. Retrospective looking – individual, capricious and selective – becomes entangled with a broader field of memory, where the past returns through body language: a gesture, a posture, a hand, a way of holding oneself before the camera.
A nostalgic and melancholic vibration emerges from the awareness that every photograph has already captured something lost. Looking and drawing allow that moment to acquire meaning once again, with the instant of the photograph becoming the duration of the drawing. Material is worked into the surface, touch follows touch, and the drawing is layered, tended to, fed, and strengthened until the form of a story begins to bloom.
In Circles Are Better Than Lines, a shift of a single degree from the upper edge of the frame introduces a slight refusal of alignment, a deliberate accident levitating within the otherwise anonymous white field. Across two dozen drawings, these disturbances draw the viewer into a labyrinth of proximity and distance, where perception takes shape through approach, withdrawal, and return.
A line moves forward, accepting a beginning and an end, while a circle arranges and rearranges the breath and rhythm of the line, folding its movement back into itself. The circle gives the line another temporality, based on recurrence. Are circles better than lines then? As angular and static propositions, they both work.
Krista Vindberga-Auzniece (b. 1989) is a visual artist working across a range of media and scales, from small-format drawings to large-scale scenographic works for theatre and opera. She holds a BA in painting from the Art Academy of Latvia and an MA in visual communication. Her work has been presented in solo, duo, and group exhibitions in Latvia and internationally, including at the Latvian National Museum of Art and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Alma Gallery in Riga, and Kogo Gallery in Tartu. In 2019, she received an award at the Prague Quadrennial. She has also received the Spēlmaņu nakts Theatre Award and the Latvian National Theatre Award for scenography. She has been nominated for the Purvītis Prize three times, in 2015, 2021, and 2023. Her work is held in the collection of the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art, the Latvian National Museum of Art, and private collections in Latvia and abroad.
Supported by: the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Latvia, the State Culture Capital Foundation, Riga City Council, Altum, KRASO, Kokmuiža, and Media Port.
Kim? Contemporary Art Centre and exhibition team:
Executive Director: Evita Goze
Programme Director: Zane Onckule
Communications Manager: Kristiāna Bērza
Project manager: Katrīna Jauģiete
Mediators: Betija Briede, Poļina Gasparoviča, Emīlija Austra Lodiņa, Anna Annemarija Samsone, Alise Sedleniece, Linda Šterna
Technical team: Mārtiņš Aulmanis, Aldis Bušs, Romāns Medvedevs
Latvian proofreading: Ilze Jansone
English proofreading: Will Mawhood