Ģirts Muižnieks was born in 1956 in Riga. He graduated from Latvian Academy of Arts in 1981 and has participated exhibitions since 1980. In 1988 Girts Muiznieks took part in the young artists’ exhibition “Post-Traditionalism” at the Central Artists’ House in Moscow. In 1990 Girts Muiznieks and his like-minded contemporaries participated in the famous exhibition-action Gentle Fluctuations. This exhibition encouraged radical aspirations of the young painters’ group and promoted the adoption of new influences in Latvian art. Girts Muiznieks is one of the most talented artists of his generation. His art is characterized by improvisation, impulsivity, fixation of the moment. In his works the refined color and the rhythm of expressive lines twisted as laces, create entire images world rich of associations.
In 2003, the painter was awarded the Reward of the Year by Latvian Artists’Association for “the flash of painting as a pure substance” in exhibitions Full Dress Portrait (Riga Gallery) and Pictures (Ivonna Veiherte Gallery). In 2007, Ģirts Mižnieks received the Award of the Year in Culture granted by Diena daily newspaper.
Girts Muiznieks' works are found in collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia), the Artists’ Union of Latvia Museum (Riga, Latvia), the State Tretyakov Gallery (Moscow), M. K. Ciurlionis Museum of Art (Kaunas, Lithuania), Georgian Museum of Art (Tbilisi, Georgia), European Central Bank, (Frankfurt, Germany) as well as in private collections in Latvia and abroad.
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This is what Ģirts Muižnieks does better than anyone else: he finds the perfect balance on a knife’s edge between the games of the more glamorous circles of society and the viewpoint of an outsider. The impressive decorative values of his works almost imperceptibly draw the viewer into the existential environment of private dramas, where the everyday phantoms of the soul encounter visions of the multiplicity of symbols of society.
Laima Slava, art critic, Visual Arts Magazine „Studija”
http://www.studija.lv/en/?parent=963
