Women artists, collective memory and a centenary: three exhibitions at Zuzeum in Riga, until 17 January 2027

Zuzeum opened on 10 September 2020 in a cork factory of 1910 on Lāčplēša iela, in the Avoti neighbourhood of Riga, built to a design by the architect and engineer Edmund von Trompowsky. The conversion, by the Riga practice Annvil, kept the industrial shell and marked the new entrance with a terraced concrete sculpture garden in orange; inside there are some 1,250 square metres of exhibition space, together with artists’ studios, a café, a shop and a roof terrace. The museum was founded in 2017 by the collector Jānis Zuzāns to show the Zuzāns Collection — close to 30,000 works, the largest private collection of Latvian art anywhere — and in June 2025 it was granted accredited museum status by the Latvian state.

The autumn season turns on that collection. Looking Away. Women Artists in the Zuzāns Collection: 2000–2026, curated by Snejana Krasteva with Jevgēnija Hamudajeva and designed by Daria Meļņikova, brings together some forty living artists from Latvia, the Baltic region and further afield, among them Helēna Heinrihsone, Ieva Iltnere, Sandra Krastiņa, Frančeska Kirke, Kris Lemsalu, Inta Ruka, Anastasia Sosunova and Nele Zirnīte. The title borrows from the British visual theorist Irit Rogoff the idea of “looking away”: rather than stopping at the finished work, the exhibition shows beside it the contextual layers the artists themselves chose — handwritten notes, a scent, a fragment of a studio wall, a work by a friend. Part of the display can be approached by touch, through 3D models made for the roughly 12,000 people in Latvia living with a vision-related disability.

In the Greenhouse and the Sculpture Garden, Collective Memory is Everything I Don’t Remember: Moments We Share, curated by Diana Kotmel Kněžínková, gathers seven Latvian artists of the millennial generation — Ieva Balode, Vika Eksta, Ieva Kraule-Kūna, Liene Pavlovska, Diāna Tamane, Krista Vindberga and Elīna Vītola — whose photography, analogue film and installations look back at the years in which Latvia restored its independence. It is the second part of the curator’s doctoral research, and admission to it is free. Both exhibitions run from 2 October 2026 to 17 January 2027.

Between them, for one week only, Raimonds Staprāns 100 (13–18 October 2026, first floor, free) marks the centenary of a painter whose work was shaped by the Bay Area Figurative movement in post-war California, and who turned boats, fruit, chairs, barrels and landscapes into a study of colour and form; he reworked his canvases at length, and the traces of repainting stayed in the finished picture. On 18 October Pēteris Krilovs’s documentary The Red Barn, on Staprāns and the Latvian and European twentieth century, has its premiere in the RIGA IFF programme.

Practical details

• When: 2 October 2026 to 17 January 2027 (Raimonds Staprāns 100: 13–18 October 2026)
• Where: Zuzeum Art Museum, Lāčplēša iela 101, Riga LV-1011, Latvia
• Opening hours: Tuesday 12 noon – 7 pm; Wednesday and Saturday 11 am – 7 pm; Thursday and Friday 11 am – 8 pm; Sunday 11 am – 5 pm; closed Monday
• Admission: see the museum’s own pages for current prices; the Greenhouse exhibition and Raimonds Staprāns 100 are free
• Curated by: Snejana Krasteva with Jevgēnija Hamudajeva (Looking Away); Diana Kotmel Kněžínková (Collective Memory)
• Organised by: Zuzeum Art Museum, Riga
• Information: telephone +371 29334554, and the museum’s exhibition pages

Cultural Heritage Online lists these exhibitions for readers who follow the museums of the Baltic states and the industrial buildings of Riga brought back into use.