Juris Tifentals

Tifentals was born in 1943 in Riga, Latvia. He began painting ca. 1956 in the studio of painter Fricis Zandbergs. In the early 1960s, he was part of the so-called non-conformist young artists and intellectuals group that used to meet on a regular basis in a café nicknamed Casa (from part of the name of the Italian-made coffee machine which also sounds like the word kaza - goat - in Latvian). Theater director Māra Ķimele, writer Juris Zvirgzdiņš, and many other later notable artists mingled there at the time. At the end of the 1960s, however, Tifentals radically distanced himself from all the socializing in Riga and until the end of his life lived as a recluse at the country house of his wife, artist and photographer Zenta Dzividzinska, There, he spent his days gardening, reading, and painting.

Because he did not graduate from the Art Academy, and thus did not belong to the official Soviet art establishment, his access to exhibition opportunities, funding, and supplies during the Soviet times were severely limited. He participated in a few exhibitions together with friends Juris Baklāns, Vija Maldupe, and Laima Eglīte. His work has remained relatively unknown to the audiences outside the narrow circle of friends and acquaintances.

Even after the end of the Soviet art system, his works have not yet found an understanding audience. After the fall of the Wall, international art critics, curators, and historians were primarily interested in the art that was modernistic in form and obviously engaging in a dialogue with the political system in its content. But Tifentals’ painting is outrageously un-modern, or arriere-garde, as he himself liked to say. He had consciously chosen to go in a direction opposite to avant-garde.

The subject matter of his paintings, mostly still lifes and landscapes, as well as a few self-portraits and portraits of Dzividzinska, tells nothing about the absurdity of the Soviet political regime, and there are no explicit signs of contemporary life per se. His paintings seemingly do not belong to their time, or, rather, they are sophisticated signs of a silent opposition. Tifentals was a lone advocate of a metaphysic art, of a meditative approach to the medium applying numerous layers of paint.

All matters contemporary in his mindset associated with either the Soviet vulgarity or the capitalist culture, and none of these options were acceptable to him. Instead, his painting embodies a certain nostalgia and longing for an imagined past. This longing was partly shaped by what he had heard about life in Riga between early 1900s and 1930s from his grandparents, Marija and Ernests who raised him. The same longing expressed itself in the material things that he surrounded himself with, including pieces of antique furniture, vintage tableware, and other objects such as vases, elements of interior decor, and the like. His rejection of everything modern and contemporary in art and life, however, was selective. He loved rock music and followed other developments of popular music, he read about new discoveries in science and technology, and was well aware of what was taking place in art, design, and literature internationally. Nevertheless, none of that directly seeped into his art.

Tifentals died in 2001 in Riga, Latvia.

Download the artist’s full bio as a pdf in English.

Download the artist’s full bio as a pdf in Latvian.