Paintings of Ģederts Eliass

The exhibition dedicated to the artist's 125th birthday anniversary reveals the most significant period of his creative activity (from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1940s), offering a selection of works from the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art, as well as from private collections and the Ģederts Eliass Jelgava History and Art Museum that holds a large part of the painter's artistic legacy.

Eliass is on of the rare representatives of early Latvian Modernism who, in the pre-war period, obtained their professional education in Western Europe – Brussels and Paris, instead of Russia. Having mastered academic painting, the artist enthusiastically and purposefully engaged in experiments with various formal findings offered by modern tendencies in the early 20th century. With his provocatively brilliant, sensual, contrasting and pure Fauvist palette Eliass innovated and rejuvenated Latvian painting in the 1920s.

The achievements of Ģederts Eliass that have hitherto been included in the canon of Latvian painting – select examples of Fauvism, neoclassical bathers and the realist peasant genre – create only a partial impression of his artistic legacy. The artist has made over a thousand oil paintings, nearly all of which are undated and unsigned, moreover he has shown but a small portion of his work in the exhibitions he participated in during his lifetime.