The history of the establishment of Grata JJ cultural center and art gallery MuseumLV began with the idea to unite and educate Latvian modern society and to support Latvian artists who have started their career after Latvia attained full independence from the Soviet Union in August 21, 1991.
Subsequently Grata JJ and MuseumLV has grown and now appear as the largest cultural center and art gallery in Rīga, the capital of the Republic of Latvia, with a wide range of cultural activities, events and projects in its list including two MuseumLV art gallery exhibition spaces of more than 600 square meters in total, Grata Art Charitable Foundation, Grata Art Academy project, Grata Prize Art contest, cultural center Grata JJ art projects.
The gallery endowment for contemporary visual art is aimed at popularizing Latvian professional artists whose skills are based on a classical European values as well as the authors, whose perception of the world is much broader than generally accepted boundaries. We provide a wide range of artists that allows us to satisfy each viewer individually. Our choice is based on a long-term personal relationships with each one of them and on the quality of each work of art.
The MuseumLV gallery organizes solo and group exhibitions on a basis of 4 exposition weeks per month approximately. Sometimes it reaches 4 exhibitions on display at 4 different branches simultaneously. We represent more than a 150 Latvian visual art authors (that is unusual for the local gallery market) and that number grows every day as the gallery MuseumLV established annual art contest exhibition for Grata Prize with 2 nominations: Gallery MuseumLV Prize - to support senior artists and Audience Choice Award - to discover young talents. Both prizes are sponsored by Grata Eco House company. The Grata Prize exhibition starts in June and usually lasts for two months each year as a charitable event. All of our authors are professional artists, lots of them got the honor to be exhibited at National Museums around the world and in Latvia.
Our close attention is driven to the amateur education projects that include lectures on art with art historians every second week, master classes, life streamings, open discussions on art issues with art critics, artists and art lovers as well as art lessons for amateurs with professional artists, art history courses, poetry evenings, bard concerts, theatre performances, documentaries filming etc. Our lectures and instructors are professional art critics and art historians working at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Art Academy of Latvia, Science Academy of Latvia, often posessing a professor degree in their discipline.
Our interest for world literature is driven to an early forms of culture such as eposes and ancient texts exploring connection between verbal and visual arts. One of the exhibition named “Gods, Heroes, Reflections and Shadows” by Dinere family included sculptures, graphics and paintings as an illustration to “Epic of Gilgamesh” - the oldest written story on Earth. Another author - our guest lecturer Uldis Berzińš is famous not only as a poet and translator from ancient languages, but is recognized as the only one who made a professional scientific translation of the Holy Quran from ancient arabic to latvian language. It took him 30 years of deep research to find and put all the details in correct and precise forms.
The owner of MuseumLV gallery and Grata JJ cultural center established Grata Art Charitable Foundation on the 11 th of October 2018 with the opening of charity exhibition named “Art Helps Vision”. Later on, 3.12.2018, the charity auction was successfully organized. All the profits were contributed to support the senior patients in need of cornea transplantation and to those whose expenses for eye health are not covered by the state. The next contribution of Grata Art Charitable Foundation is devoted to latvian senior artists in need.
You may ask yourself why, what for and how come the play is so intense...There is no intrigue. The leader and owner and the art director are artists. And this is not a play for them. It is the way artist lives. Artist life. And we share our lives with everyone.
