PUBLICS
Free to all

Exhibition runs: 19 March – 25 April
Opening: Wed 19 March, 5.30 – 7.30 pm

Join us at PUBLICS on March 19 for the opening event of the COUPLING exhibition featuring Inga Meldere and Hanele Zane Putniņa. More details coming soon!

Artist BIOS

Inga Meldere (b. 1979) lives and works in Helsinki and is a Master of Fine Arts in the field of Painting. Between 2013 and 2014, Meldere was a researcher at Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, Netherlands. In her practice, she emphasises painting as a performative tool and looks at it as an expanded field. Meldere works with cross- disciplinary, innovative, and speculative approaches within conservation and contemporary art. Her practice explores the traces of impermanence, dealing with questions around authenticity, social history, and the exploration of micro-histories.

Meldere’s recent exhibitions include ‘Sunpoles’ together with Luīze Nežberte, KIM?, Riga (2024), ‘Brethwork’, Pech, Vienna, Austria (2024), ‘Bluetooth (Sister N.)’, Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn (2022); ‘Hidden matter’ with Mikko Hintz, Helsinki Contemporary (2019); She has participated in various group exhibitions, including ‘The Same Sea’, Helsinki Biennial (2021); ‘There and Back Again – Contemporary art from Baltic Sea region’, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2018 – 2019).

Hanele Zane Putniņa (b. 1990) lives and works in Riga. Hanele’s graphic works are mostly based on mythological characters from folklore and legends, which the artist often recreates in large-format linocut. These imposing compositions of cosmologic images mix with depictions of the absurd found in modest everyday situations, which she sometimes calls ‘Bruegels’.

Hanele is interested in historic printmaking techniques and all that surrounds them. The artist continues her journey in the world of the linocut, taking the biggest possible gouges and striving to find treasures among the linoleum’s shavings. She is rapidly approaching her first hectare carved in linoleum.

Since the release of her large-format book ‘Smurgulis un Īscaurule’ [The Brat and the Branch-Pipe] in 2012, Hanele Zane Putniņa has established her underground publishing house Rakete in Riga. The connection between printmaking techniques and books is so striking that, when the night comes, she retires to her press to put together a few layouts.