Jana Brike
 Jana Brike was born in year 1980 in Riga, Latvia, a small country in the North-East of Europe, which was at that time under Soviet occupation. She has exhibited her work internationally in professional venues since 1996 while being still a young teenager, and has had 11 solo exhibitions and nearly 100 other projects and group exhibitions all over the world. Her inspirations for work has been as diverse as: folklore fairy tales, children book illustrations, imaginative soviet animation films and supernaturally realistic classical painting; the colorful forbidden rare secret imagery of the western pop culture surrounded by mystical, almost religious tone for the soviet children; the terrifying war and deportation stories that her grandparents and their little brothers and sister witnessed as small children; pompous alienated eerie atmosphere of the catholic church ceremonies in the Latvian countryside, and the breathtakingly beautiful ballet performances in the opera house, where she was taken since the age of two, as well as others - all the bitter-sweetness and irreality of the every day.
The main focus of Jana Brike's art is the internal space and state of a human soul - dreams, longing, love, pain, growing up and self-discovery |
