Riga art museum hosts exhibition on Latvia's nearly vanished wood-meadow landscape
An exhibition on wooded meadows, which survive in Latvia on only about 1,400 hectares, runs at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga from 23 October to 15 November. Large-format photographs show eight artists and groups encountering the landscape.
The exhibition “Journey to Marsi. The Artist Enters a Wooded Meadow” is on at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga from 23 October to 15 November. It was created jointly by the Latvian Fund for Nature and artists Kristaps Kalns and Sarmīte Māliņa. It introduces wooded meadows, one of Latvia's rarest and most biologically diverse landscapes, which today survive on only about 1,400 hectares.
The display is in the third-floor vestibule of the museum's main building at Jāņa Rozentāla laukums 1. Large-format photographs show the meetings of eight Latvian artists and artist groups with the meadow landscape in different seasons, along with their impressions and memories. Most of the images were taken in Marsi, in Valka municipality, one of the finest and oldest wooded meadows in the country.
Artists meet nature
In 2025 and 2026, the following visited wooded meadows in the Ziemeļgauja area: artists Ieva Iltnere and Jānis Mitrēvics, the group “Skuja Braden”, sculptor Aigars Bikše, poet Jānis Rokpelnis, composer Krists Auznieks and artist Krista Vindberga-Auzniece, artist Andris Eglītis, actor Vilis Daudziņš and the band “Alejas”. Photographer Kristaps Kalns captured these encounters, presenting people as part of the cultural landscape. The artists expressed their experience in the artistic language closest to them, and their works complement the exhibition.
Exhibition author Sarmīte Māliņa describes a wooded meadow as a place where nature's diversity can be experienced with all the senses. “We could feel like children closely studying an illustrated book,” she says. Kalns describes his role as bringing people and the meadow together.
A nearly vanished landscape
Wooded meadows have large, ancient trees scattered across them, with open grassland in a mosaic between. Over centuries these landscapes formed through traditional practices such as haymaking and livestock grazing. They are among the most species-rich ecosystems in the region, home to wild species typical of both forests and meadows, as well as communities that live on sparse, sunlit trees.
As farming methods changed, wooded meadows nearly disappeared in Latvia. Inese Ebele, director of the Latvian Fund for Nature, says the artists' involvement helps draw attention to the landscape's significance and to the question of the relationship between people and nature.
