Jana Brike

Jana Brike is a Latvian figurative painter born in 1980 in Riga, during the Soviet occupation. From the age of five she received rigorous technical training in painting and drawing intended to produce artists for the Soviet propaganda apparatus — an education that paradoxically gave her the tools to build an absolutely personal language. She studied at the Latvian Academy of Art, where she obtained her master's degree in 2005, and began exhibiting internationally at the age of 16. Her work describes a poetic visual autobiography in which Latvian folklore, fairy tales, Baltic nature and the rites of passage between childhood and adulthood interweave in compositions of great symbolic density. Her figures — frequently naked adolescent females — inhabit dreamlike landscapes where innocence and pain coexist with equal intensity. She has exhibited worldwide and her work is held in numerous private and institutional collections.