Sentimental Values. Brants and Vorkale — Riga Art Nouveau Museum, 16 October – 6 December 2026

The museum at Alberta iela 12 is itself an Art Nouveau building: an apartment house of 1903 by Konstantīns Pēkšēns and Eižens Laube, in the district of Riga where the style accounts for a large share of the city centre. Its rooms now hold an exhibition built on two private vocabularies rather than on an architectural survey. Sentimental Values. Brants and Vorkale puts the porcelain of Inese Brants beside the paintings of Irīna Vorkale, and lets them talk about the same things: ornament, the beauty of material, and the crafts a household keeps.

Brants paints coffee and tea services with embroidery motifs, transferred onto porcelain in coloured glazes — needlework that has changed material and kept its pattern. Vorkale’s paintings, hung through the museum’s galleries, turn to women’s domestic life, to fashion and to the sewing traditions behind it; one of them starts from a family object, a black lacquered Singer sewing machine with gold lettering that belonged to her grandmother, a seamstress of some reputation. In a building whose own ornament was drawn in 1903, the two bodies of work read as a single argument about what a family decides to keep.

Practical details

• Dates: 16 October – 6 December 2026
• Opening hours: 10am to 6pm daily, closed Mondays (ticket desk closes 5.45pm)
• Where: Rīgas Jūgendstila centrs (Riga Art Nouveau Museum), Alberta iela 12, LV-1010 Riga, Latvia
• Organised by: Rīgas Jūgendstila centrs, museum of the Riga municipal cultural institutions
• Information: jugendstils.riga.lv

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition because it happens inside the heritage it belongs to: not a show about Art Nouveau in a neutral gallery, but new work shown in an apartment house of 1903 that was built in the style.