From April 22 to 28 with the opening of the new exhibition of the original works of the world-famous Daugavpils-born artist Mark Rothko and several other cultural events the tenth anniversary of the Daugavpils Mark Rothko Art Center will be celebrated. “We have done a lot, but there is still a lot to do,” says the head of the center Māris Čačka. We will meet him in Riga, at the Daile Theater, where the exhibition “Rotkho. Made in Latvia” has just opened – copies of Rothko’s works made by Latvian artists can be seen there.
Čačka not only performs the duties of the head of the Rothko Center, but is also a well-known artist who has participated in more than 80 art exhibitions both in Latvia and abroad. “If you organize your working time and the rest of your time correctly, everything is possible,” says Čačka about the balance between administrative and creative work.
At the end of 2022, a big scandal took place in the Rothko Center – the Daugavpils City Council ordered the removal of three works – “Juzi”, “Sheeple” and “Dicksus” – from the personal exhibition of the Estonian artist Sanders Raudsep “Deadly Desire to End After Death”. It seems that some of the visitors were most outraged by the last one – it depicts a man’s penis glued to a cross. After this scandal, there were several discussions about the censorship of art and what is or is not art today. “I have made a mistake by allowing this fact of censorship to materialize with my hands,” Čačka admits.
We will meet at Dailes Theater when you are doing the last works of the “Rotkho. Made in Latvia” project. Tell me why the exhibition was created here?
A year ago, a wonderful play “Rotkho” was performed in the Daile Theater, in the name of which the letter k and h are interchanged in some places (in English, the artist’s last name is written as “Rothko”). The show accurately illuminates the warped forms and people’s understanding of the contemporary world art market, as well as the reaction to who has created a painting – whether it has a specific author or whether it is crypto-art or something else.
We regularly go outside Daugavpils and even Latvia with exhibitions of the Rothko Center’s collection, as well as with specially designed projects. More than a year ago, when we started planning the center’s ten-year program, we realized that we had to go outside our comfort zone again, just like before.
The themes and plot line of the play “Rotkho” became an encouragement to create the exhibition “Rotkho. Made in Latvia” directly in the Daile Theater. We invited six, in our opinion, the most important Latvian artists (Franceska Kirki, Aleksei Naumov, Sandra Strēli, Helena Heinrichson, Ritum Ivanova and Kaspar Zariņa) who created copies of Rothko’s works. The exhibition opens at the Daile Theater on April 18, and it is significant, because in ten days only the originals of these six Rothko works will be on display in Daugavpils. I predict that the works created by Latvian artists will be magnets that will attract people to go and compare, look, remember whether copies and originals are really similar, etc. etc. It should be noted that, according to the norms, all Rothko copies are one centimeter larger on each side.
The path of Rothko’s original works to Daugavpils was by no means easy this time.
Yes, but every exhibition that is brought to the Rothko Center every three years is not easy to implement – neither logistically nor in any other way, it is always a complex project with strict security conditions. Even earlier, when Russia had not yet started the war in Ukraine, the transportation was secret, the delivery routes of the paintings were changed at the last moment. That’s both the flight from the US and the land and shipping leg.
