Biography
Latvian painter Māra Zītare was born on 22 July 1937 in Riga, to a railway worker and a civil servant. In 1955, she graduated from the Janis Rozentāls Art School, and in 1961, completed the Painting Department of the Art Academy of Latvia. After her studies, Zītare worked as a teacher at the Riga Design and Art Secondary School and also ran her own art studio “Umbra”.[1]
The painter passed away on 25 December 2018.
Artistic Style
Continuing the colourist traditions of Latvian painting, Zītare pursued in her work a deliberate search for colour moods that would correspond to a given subject, whilst simultaneously generalising and stylising form across a range of genres. The painter belongs to a generation which, reassessing the constraints of Socialist Realism, sought alternative means of expression by developing generalised figurative compositions with figures rendered in laconic forms, transforming the everyday into moods of timelessness. Her nuanced palette creates a contemplative world of imagery rooted in aesthetic values.[2]
Zītare worked primarily in oil and tempera, painting allegorical, figurative compositions, interpretations of the mother-and-child theme, landscapes, and still lifes. Her works from the 1970s are characterised by a balance of large, defined colour fields, monumentality, and economy of means. In the decades that followed, her manner increasingly displays a more expressive dynamism and tension of movement, a relief-like texture in the application of white, an accentuated rhythm of horizontally directed movement, and an overlapping of the boundaries between colour fields.[3]
The painter's works are located in private collections in Latvia, France, Japan, the UK, and Sweden, as well as elsewhere in the world. They are also included in several museum collections, among them the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia), the Museum of the Latvian Artists’ Union (Riga, Latvia), and Tukums Museum (Tukums, Latvia).[4]
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[1] Šmite E. Zītare, Māra // Māksla un arhitektūra biogrāfijās, IV / Atb. red. A. Vanaga, Rīga: AS Preses nams, 2003.–142.–143. lpp.