Beyond Maps Into Emotions: Where Cities and Souls Collide

The exhibition “Katrina Avotina: Beyond Maps Into Emotions” invites the visitor on a journey to re-explore beloved cities from around the world. The exhibition’s concept “psychogeography” is a term coined by Guy Debord during the Situationist Movement and refers to the exploration of the relationship between cities and the human psyche. The places we pass by daily hold significance that maps cannot capture due to their limited nature. This concept brings the essence of everyday life to the art conversation, inspiring artists to reimagine cities from their unique perspectives. Cities are rich with embedded meanings and stories that  artists explore and reflect upon. The exhibition aims to take the visitors on a journey to rethink urban structures and enjoy Katrina Avotina's reimaginations. 

Katrina Avotina’s solo exhibition, curated by Naz Ogun and presented by follow.art, is available online from the 18th of March until the 22nd of April, ensuring accessibility to all. Avotina emphasizes the significance of online platforms in art promotion, stating,

She believes that showcasing her artwork online enables her to reach a global and diverse audience, advancing her goal of spreading joy through her paintings.

The Latvian artist, with over 25 years of experience as a painter, aims to spread beauty in the world through her paintings. Employing a vibrant colour palette, she creates lively acrylic cityscapes that evoke positive emotions in viewers.  She draws inspiration from great artists like Monet, Matisse, Picasso and particularly Hundertwasser, whose work moved her to tears in a museum for the first time. Her paintings bear traces of the Impressionist movement, as she constructs cities from her unique perspective, allowing emotions to unfold on the canvas. She still succeeds in staying loyal to the roots of reality. In her cities, there's an enchanting, fairy-tale ambience where the sun never fails to shine, and the canals sparkle like a thousand diamonds. Avotina rebuilds beloved cities such as Paris, Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo and New York as if looking through a kaleidoscope, making them uniquely hers through her personal interpretation.

When asked about the city that inspires her the most, she mentions New York’s bustling and diverse streets. She is captivated by the city’s ever-changing dynamics and its status as a cultural melting pot. New York’s old and new architecture, and the play of light and shadow inspire Avotina to explore the dynamics of modern urban life. Avotina emphasizes the significant role of color in expressing a city's emotions, carefully selecting each hue to evoke specific feelings associated with different urban environments. To depict the energy of cities, she opts for vibrant colors like fiery reds, electric blues, and vivid yellows, while employing earthy browns, cool blues, and soft greys to evoke a sense of calmness.

In her work, Avotina focuses on thematic elements and narratives whether it is celebrating the vibrancy of street life, capturing the solitude of urban spaces or reflecting on the social and environmental issues facing modern cities. She spends time wandering through city streets, observing the architecture, people, and rhythms of urban life.

To build a sense of narrative, she includes figures engaged in everyday activities. Her paintings are dynamic, with a constant sense of motion embedded in each piece. Floating balloons against the backdrop of the sky, people leisurely strolling through streets adorned with flowers, and vibrant colours reflecting on the canals all contribute to the kinetic energy that animates her reimagined urban environments. In his book “Invisible Cities”, Italo Calvino writes  “Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.” Katrina Avotina uses symbols and colours to create a narrative but still encourages the visitors to find the answers to their questions. She believes her paintings are open to interpretation because she wants the visitors to engage with her cities.

Life's ever-changing nature allows humans to be perpetual visitors, transiently passing through cities they can never truly possess. Perhaps the only means of truly owning a city is to embrace it through one's own unique perspective. Katrina Avotina’s paintings reflect the transformative power of psychogeography, turning cities into living, breathing entities shaped not just by their physical structures but also by the emotional imprints of those who wander through them. Whether it is the bustling streets of New York, the enchanting parks of Paris under the bright blue sky or the scenic canals of Venice in Katrina Avotina's paintings, there is some sort of warmth that makes her cities feel peaceful and serene. One cannot help but wish to stay in her paintings. Because her paintings are still true to reality, her reconstructions become mirages of cities that one cannot reach but only can see in their dreams.

“Beyond Maps Into Emotions” offers a brand new perspective to its visitors and asks them to stop and see the world through their emotions and experiences. The exhibition can be visited here!