Earlier this month, international art fair circuit newcomer Riga Contemporary opened in a sleekly converted former warehouse in the Latvian capital. The more than forty participating galleries hailed mainly from Nordic and Eastern European countries, but a handful came from as far away as the U.S., Japan, China, South Korea and Indonesia. While Latvia isn’t the first locale to come to mind when most people think of contemporary art, the fair—which was free with prior registration—drew 12,000 visitors.
“For me, it’s completely flabbergasting when people are like, ‘Why Riga?’ Even people based in Riga!” Jeffrey Rosen, co-director of Tokyo-based Misako & Rosen and co-president of the board of the New Art Dealers Alliance, told Observer. (He was wearing a T-shirt that read “99% joke 1% art.”) Rosen not only showed Lawrence Leaman and Nathan Hylden at his booth at Riga Contemporary but was also an instrumental behind-the-scenes player in its launch. The core curatorial direction for the invitation-only fair came from Rosen, and his familiarity with fair models that are less expensive and more casual, like NADA, likely helped Riga Contemporary find its footing.
His initial approach to building out the fair centered on inviting more mainstream commercial galleries with an artist from the Baltics on their roster. “I think if those spaces participated, they actually could do well,” he said. Yet despite early interest, those art actors ultimately didn’t partake. “They don’t necessarily have the time to be adventurous,” but the ones who did show up were “willing to de-prioritize the sales part of this for a moment, with a longer view.”
Notably, Rosen has a personal connection to Latvia. At 17 years old, he dropped out of college and moved to Riga based on the suggestion of a close friend who had gone there as an exchange student in the mid-1990s. “Although my time here was brief, it left a really strong impression,” he reflected. “I’ve always wanted to come back and was really curious about what was happening here in terms of the art world, because that was my world.”
He readily admits, however, that the Baltic region has been rather barren as far as contemporary art goes. Riga itself has no contemporary art museum. The closest neighboring fair, Art Vilnius in Lithuania, “was definitely a point of reference for us, but mostly as an example for perseverance,” Zane Čulkstēna, founder of Riga Contemporary and Kim? Contemporary Art Centre (Riga’s first player with a sustained contemporary art program), told Observer. Čulkstēna participated in Art Vilnius’ first edition 16 years ago: “It felt like nobody came,” she recalled. “Like, nobody. Yet they did not give up. Right now, it has become a very good regional player. Radical changes require radical patience.”
Since 2021, Kim? Contemporary Art Centre has been an active participant in the international art fair circuit, with recent appearances at NADA Miami (2022), Paris Internationale (2023) and Warsaw Gallery Weekend (2024), among others. In 2022, Kim? launched Riga Confidential, a micro fair that brought together nine galleries. The Baltic and Nordic references at Riga Contemporary mostly came from the Kim? team as a way to be “inclusive of the existing scene,” which Čulkstēna refers to as one that “underpromises and overdelivers, in many respects.” The goal of the fair’s debut edition was attracting local attendance. Starting next year, the focus will broaden to include international visitors and collectors.
Čulkstēna completed an arts administration program at Columbia University—mixing accounting, business law, copyright, fundraising strategies, art history, education and philosophy—and brought that knowledge back to her homeland. “In combination with missing infrastructure and an economic situation that could be better,” she said, “the result is that there are very few collectors. The whole concept of actually acquiring art and having art at home or at the office is still not common in Latvia.” Moreover, the “post-Soviet post-traumatic effect is that art and money do not mix. One is pure, and one is dirty.”
Latvian gallery Masksla XO’s booth showed a sculpture installation by Nils Jumitis, and gallerist Biruta Auriņa was “surprised in a good way” about the fair’s turnout and “hoped it will be a tradition.” The gallery, which has been open for 25 years, is one of the oldest on the scene and has shown work in the past at POSITIONS in Berlin and viennacontemporary. “We have to cultivate this culture of buying art, of supporting art,” Auriņa said of the lagging Latvian art scene.
At the eponymous Polina Berlin, a young gallery based in New York, the booth showcased works by Casey Bolding. Berlin was born in Riga but grew up in the U.S. and worked at Paula Cooper before opening her own space. “I was astounded by the level of thoughtfulness and innovation,” she said of the fair, where she also showed Amanda Ziemele, who represented Latvia at the last Venice Biennale. “It’s kind of refreshing to be the only New York gallery here—that never happens,” she quipped. “Everyone’s been very welcoming, which is so nice and perhaps unusual in the art world. It’s a very different group of people than you would encounter at other fairs or in other cities.” She appreciated the scale especially. “I’m not trying to offer something for everyone—and neither is this fair. It’s almost like a back-to-basics thing… It loses this special specificity when it gets too big.”
For Rosen, orchestrating that special specificity was the point. Based in Otsuka, Japan, the Texas-born dealer felt on the periphery of the commercial art world, “both geographically and in terms of the power structure.” When he opened Misako & Rosen together with his wife, “it became evident pretty quickly that the best way—the only way—we could function is if we had found galleries that are in a similar position as us and work together.” Rosen’s gallery attends NADA in Miami, Art Basel Hong Kong, Frieze Seoul, miart in Milan, Art OnO in Seoul and a lot of smaller fairs in Japan. He and the Kim? team have collaborated before in Japan, as part of Rosen’s Hot Spring Project.
“The fair model is broken,” he continued, in that many are so profit-driven that it isn’t sustainable for anyone beyond a handful of mega-galleries to continually participate. A fair like Riga Contemporary is “subversive” in part because it’s not as expensive to attend as it’s subsidized by Latvia’s Ministry of Culture, minimizing the economic risk and allowing for non-transactional exchanges. “You try to create a situation which is not off-putting, which is not elitist, but at the same time is not, in any way, selling short art, artists and the thought behind the production of art,” said Rosen. “It’s kind of oddly anti-capitalist.”
The fair’s public program of panels addressed topics ranging from new models of patronage to the evolving role of technology in artistic production. In the opener, “The Role of Galleries in the 21st Century,” gallerist Olga Temnikova (half of Temnikova & Kasela Gallery, headquartered in Tallinn) noted: “We don’t host people in the Baltics that much—I mean it’s hard to get people here.” She herself helped spearhead a twenty-five-gallery micro fair, ESTHER, in New York at the Estonia House, an event subsidized by the Estonian government.
“Can this work? I feel like it can,” Rosen mused. “As long as the fair is able to sustain the funding that makes this possible for us to come here without spending an arm and a leg—why not?” He admitted that it requires a degree of commitment and support from participants. “They don’t necessarily have to be the same people coming back. But I think those who stick with it will benefit from sticking with it.”
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