On the occasion of the beginning of the 15th year from its foundation Dorothy Circus Gallery Rome is extremely proud to present for the first time in its own space a solo exhibition by the contemporary painter Jana Brike titled Forever and A Day.
As a women founded and runned industry Dorothy Circus has always spread social values and stood for the bold, the impact and the change.
Jana Brike’s Art is dearly rooted in the gallery core concept which has always directed its efforts towards curating exhibitions that focused on the return of the female narratives in Art, with particular attention to women artists bringing the public attention to the female voice as the narrator and the connector of humanity. Sensitive topics of feminism, gender equality and women's rights have been emphasised through the gallery’s curatorial programme, which also recently dedicated particular attention to maternal relations and female iconography in the art world with the major collective exhibition ‘Mother and Child’ held both in Rome and London also featuring Jana Brike’s painting “the Peaceful Warrior”.
Common to the most brave artists and writers, Jana Brike tasks with the weighty and inevitable responsibility of transforming the collective feelings and the historical moments related, into images and narratives that carry the potential to endure over time.
Born in Soviet-occupied Latvia in 1980, the surrealist painter Jana Brike creates extraordinary whimsical scenarios through which we glimpse into an intimate world of what she describes as a ‘poetic visual autobiography’ yet Conveying the essence of the collective sentiments to audiences, present and future by fully immerging in a social revolution of our time.
The main focus of Jana Brike's art is the internal space and contemporary state of a human soul, dreams, love, pain, the vast range of emotions that the human condition offers and the transcendence of them all, the growing up and self-discovery.
Much akin to the tribal folklore of Jana's Latvian heritage, she weaves her encrypted narratives filled with haunting mystery and dramatic intrigue.
Rich in metaphor and symbolism, Brike's new beautifully crafted body of paintings read like visual poetry brimming with meaning, unfolding like tales of growth and transformation.
Within the 12 brand new artworks presented, detailed dreamscapes show female figures, in playful and unselfconscious discovery of the world around them. There is often a juxtaposition of harshness with hope in her paintings, with figures showing bloody scratches, incisions or redness on their skin and surrounded by butterflies or flowers. Vulnerability and intimacy is also an important characteristic of Brike’s work.
Nakedness and nature often go together in her paintings, and Brike has described the human body as ‘vulnerability in its nakedness’. The frequently portrayed adolescent girls, sometimes depicted in scenes of erotic exploration are metaphors for the continual discovery of ourselves and represent the growth we all do throughout our lives no matter what our biological age or gender.
Her works in this way act as a paean to free-spirited femininity, a celebration of Earth and nature, and freedom from oppression that rises like the purest choir we all urge to join in.
Ultimately, living an inspired life, her relationship with her native environment, and her role as a mother, all combine to create Brike’s uniquely personal yet universal visual language
Disarmingly candid though each painting may be in articulating the subjective reality of being a woman artist in the public eye telling a no filter story of womanhood in the first quarter of the 21st century.
