During the holiday season, Riga Porcelain Museum offers the opportunity to experience the art of Ilona Romula and her sensual world of imagination in the exhibition "Unplayed Games", in the display windows of the first floor of the museum. The theme of the exposition resonates with the idea of unfinished things that must be returned to in order to complete or resolve them. Like a game that is started and then abandoned at some point halfway through. It's not known why or how long the break has been, but for the game to make sense, it needs to be played to the end. A solution has to be reached, someone has to win and someone has to lose. Stylistically, the exhibition is based on an image - a childhood toy: a moving doll whose spherical base, when rocked, always returns to its initial position. Using it as a starting point, Ilona Romule creates a new set of images: in variations and combinations of shapes, elements that move from one image to another, the anthropomorphic merges with the geometric shapes, the imagined with the real. All of the surreal types in the team, share something similar, yet each has its own special character. All of them are in some relationship with each other and the meaning of the image changes with the change of position in the overall structure. It is an unplayed game in which the winner or loser is not yet known; everything is in process - your turn!

Ilona Romule is one of the most expressive personalities in Latvian porcelain art and one of the best-known Latvian porcelain artists in the world. Ilona Romule's arsenal of means of artistic expression includes the filigree use of porcelain techniques, unique image systems and elegant, graphic design that expressively complements the original forms. She is one of the rare artists who also works in the lithophany technique.

Revealing her creative process, Ilona Romule says that she draws inspiration from travels, contact with other cultures, and communication. A different environment, architecture, ethnographic art, a different culture of relationships. Ideas for works arise in non-specific, intangible situations, for example, seeing the peculiar shadows and silhouettes of known objects in the early morning hours, watching cracks, the movement of clouds, prints of a tea cup on sketch paper; while dreaming and waking up from the dreams. Specific life situations, people leave impressions and imprints, memories of feelings and atmospheres, which are further transmitted in the works and in the expressive artistic images characteristic only of Ilona Romule. At different stages of life, different image and thematic lines are developed, sometimes emphasizing construction and design qualities, even creating functional objects such as tigerware jugs and horse vases, sometimes giving in to emotional and expressive expression and creating sculptural works of art. Sometimes the author returns to earlier topics and resumes work with them, already with a new view and mood.

Ilona Romule has held more than 20 personal exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, participated in more than 50 international competition exhibitions and more than 80 group exhibitions on all continents of the world. She regularly participates in international porcelain art symposia and creative residencies, gives lectures and conducts workshops in porcelain art centers in Hungary, China, USA. The artist also regularly leads master classes in plaster mold making, lithophany and porcelain painting at universities and art centers around the world.

"Unplayed Games" is the final exhibition in the artist's jubilee exhibition cycle, which began in June this year with the solo exhibition "Two Sides" at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design in Riga and is currently continuing with the solo exhibition "Light of Breakout" in the Daugavpils Fortress exhibition hall "Martinsona māja" in Daugavpils.

Ilona Romula's previous solo exhibition at the Riga Porcelain Museum was "Lithophany and other fine creatures" in 2012.

The exhibition cycle is supported by the State Culture Capital Fund.

The exhibition at the Riga Porcelain Museum can be viewed until February 5, 2023.

Publicity image: Ilona Romula's works from the series "Unplayed Games". Porcelain. 2022.

Photo: Gvido Kajons