Ice cream

Boriss Bērziņš was one of the most prominent Latvian painters of the second half of the 20 th century. He worked in oil, tempera, watercolour, pastel and graphic techniques, covering the still life, landscape, household and figural genres. Boriss Bērziņš was associated with a circle of “rough style” artists in Latvia. The paintings of Bērziņš demonstrate formal solutions, which, together with the tonally exquisite colour, the expressiveness of the contour and the smooth line, form a composition with special character. “I like pure things with a pure form”, Bērziņš commented, emphasising the meaning of form over space, highlighting the plane. Colour in Boris Bērziņš works stands as a basic value – bright, expressive and intense, radical for its time, yet monochrome and reserved in later years. Unsurprisingly, a unique and independent “Bērziņš’ brown” has entered the history of art as a term. The great draftsman’s talent of the artist was revealed in figural plastics. Using the line, a naked woman becomes an inexhaustible plastic-formal challenge for Boris Bērziņš. Undeniably, he created statues in his works, depicting women in a sauna or swimming, drawing their backs, skirts, food with pig heads and chicken legs, as well as musical instruments and coffee pots. Bērziņš managed to paint these everyday scenes, applying rich philosophical generalisation. “A theme like “In the sauna” means painting a woman who is bathing in the sauna. But behind it, there is a small miracle.” The artist left a rich creative heritage, most of which is stored in the Latvian National Museum of Art.