The gallery’s collaboration with Laima Puntule began back in the 1990s. Laima appeared very promising. A true discovery were her drawings and her work in animation. Later, the collaboration was interrupted, as art buyers at the time were not prepared for Laima Puntule’s painting. She did not depict what she saw, but rather what she felt, thought, and knew. Although the gallery included Laima’s works in its international exhibitions, for example in Madrid at Sala Milares, where we presented works by 21 Latvian artists. At that time, she was a young woman with fiery red hair an a very convincing talent, graduate of The Art Academy of Latvia. Now Laima has been living with her family in Copenhagen for 12 years. A few years ago, it was not possible to see Laima’s exhibition in Jūrmala, therefore she was asked to preparē a collection of her paintings for Gallery Daugava in Riga.

Ilze Gailīte-Holmberga, an expert in creative industries, writes:

”This exhibition reveals painting as an existential act – a quiet, all-encompassing presence in time and space. Painting here is not representation, but presence; not a narrative, but a record of being, in its constant change. Each work is like an intimate note within a broader personal experience of what it means to exist, to feel, to remain, and to disappear. The artist works with a limited color palete – black, blue, and red – not using color symbolically, but treating it as a note of existence – silence, distance, and presence. The artist rejects narrative closure and obvious clarity. The works do not form a story, but rather a multilayered flow of associations that balances between sensation and it’s impossibility, between the desire to remain and the inevitable distancing. The exhibition invites the viewer into a slowed, attentive presence, where looking becomes participation in this fragile state of being. Here, feeling, arises before words, meaning – before formulation. The works do not tell a story.”