From 16. november.2024 till 27. jauary 2025. in Culture Center of Jurmala.

The exhibition series CITY ANGELS was created to talk about the self-sufficient and full-blooded interaction of the city and nature around us without human arrogance. We would take a closer look at the world of small and insignificant creatures, who live their big and true lives without hypocritical dramas.

This world gets along wonderfully without us, but we would be much poorer without it. To paraphrase Francis of Assisi, “God’s presence in the world is understood as his presence in every creation.” In everyone we see around us and who is of undoubted value in the overall world picture. Analyzing Chakas’ poetry, although we stereotypically perceive this author as a troubadour of city life, his lines also capture with the greatest sensitivity the essential participation of the city’s eco-system in life processes. The small living beings living in the city are both a symbol and an important characteristic of the environment.

These subtle poetic vibrations served as a source of inspiration for the exhibition, and with them I want to draw the viewer's attention to a perhaps overlooked and less analyzed layer in the poetry of such a well-known author. As the central element of the exhibition, the shutters of the veranda window that have served their time have been chosen, which we will recognize in more than one summer house in Jurmala during the time of Čaks. The shutters, like the closed eyelids of the window on which the soul of poetry is reflected, are one of the strongest metaphorical images with which the author plays. Moreover, knowing that Aleksandrs Čaks belonged to the Orthodox culture, a parallel is involuntarily formed with the iconostasis of the city's eco-system, which already resonates in the most direct way with the artistic language included in the message. Gold helps to generalize everyday scenes, to elevate them to the status of a sign. The golden background is like a luminous environment in which the immersed world operates in pure energy and love, an intermediate space between the sacred and the secular.

Each subsequent exhibition in the cycle is like a new page with new observations and stories, which are essentially endless. By setting up the exhibition during Christmas, we are invited to weigh the imagined importance of people against the “little life” that is happening right next to us.

Ineta Freidenfelde graduated from Liepāja College of Applied Arts, graduated from the scenography and painting departments of the Latvian Academy of Arts. Ineta Freidenfelde works in the field of icon restoration, the basics of which she learned at the Latvian Christian Academy and Riga Construction College. She has improved her gilding skills, renovation and decorative painting skills with teachers in Holland and Great Britain. The painter has been participating in exhibitions since 1997 and is a member of the Latvian Artists' Union. Ineta Freidenfelde's works have been exhibited not only in Latvia, but also in the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Sweden, the USA, etc. In 2023, she received the poet Aleksandrs Čakas Encouragement Award for the reflection of local wildlife in art.