Riga 2025

The exhibition CUT ART AWARD brings together the work of three emerging artists — Vincent Jernev, Egor Buimister, and Anastasia Shneps-Shneppe.
The exhibition unfolds like a garden — an intricate, ever-changing space, where three artistic universes take root and intertwine. Here, ideas and images bloom, forming a landscape where past and future, personal and collective coexist. Each artist cultivates their own terrain, yet their works resonate with one another, creating a shared environment.
Building upon Jorge Louis Borges’ story “Garden of Forking Paths”, the exhibition rejects the notion of an artwork as a fait accompli, instead presenting it as a living process — one that is never complete, always evolving and breaking down, perpetually in dialogue with the forces that shape it. The Garden of Fractured Paths is a space of uncertainty and potential, where the boundaries between past, present and future, self and other, are always in a state of flux. Vincent Jernev’s project “0024” is an artistic investigation into the creative process, where inquisitiveness and routine converge to shape a holistic body of work. Drawing from the Metaphysical and Futurist movements, Vincent traces a genealogical line from the early 20th-century avant-garde to the present, channeling the legacies of Vasily Kandinsky, Giacomo Balla, and Giorgio de Chirico. Yet, while these movements once promised radical rupture and revolution, “0024” explores a different narrative — one of fragility, transformation, and the quiet forces that shape artistic evolution.
Starting with GroundLoop, an installation that reflects Jernev’s engagement with daily practices, the project emphasizes the importance of iterative drawing and exploration. Through this process, he constructs a foundation for larger compositions, uncovering new perspectives, decorative motifs, and technical markings that later merge into paintings. Components such as the Fire Extinguisher serve as conceptual elements that visualize the artist’s thought processes, offering insight into his motivations and artistic intentions. Meanwhile, the “EarthBox” paintings consolidate these explorations into cohesive works, representing the culmination of the artist's journey.  By illustrating the progression from initial studies to the finished canvases, “0024” provides viewers with a glimpse into the layered evolution of artistic ideas, fostering a deeper connection to the work.
Egor Buimister's project "Scenes from the Ode to the Confederate Dead – An Intermediary Report" offers another entry into the theme of transformation through time. Buimister’s work is informed by his free interpretation of Allan Tate’s poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead”, and his exploration into the fragility of memory and the power of what remains unsaid. Buimister’s paintings, executed in watercolour on canvas, engage with the tension between historical consciousness and the ineffable, the known and the unknowable. He draws upon fragmented visions of history — of bones, wind, and transformation — that are simultaneously tangible and elusive. His project interrogates the dichotomy between the transient and the eternal, positioning itself as an intermediary space between the memory and the oblivion, the known and the forgotten. In his work, the subjects become sites of continual reinvention.
Anastasia Shneps-Shneppe’s project “Angelica” brings a feminist perspective to the exhibition. Artist reflects on the image of the sacred garden as a metaphor for the impossible ideal of Madonna-like motherhood — a construct that shapes perception more than lived experience. Angelica, in contrast, emerges as a transitional figure, embodying maternal subjectivity in flux — between subject, object and abject, — a state Julia Kristeva links to herethics, where fluidity becomes a form of agency rather than constraint. This shifting mode is conveyed through dynamic interplay of sculptures and photographs. In the series of human-size rosaries, the body is rendered through fragile glass objects — casts of early childhood relics (a baby bottle nipple, a lounge chair) alongside the artist's own shoulders — evoking both power shoulders and angel wings. The maternal is manifested as a structure of care and support, yet one that is frozen in a liminal state. Glass materialises this tension between fragility and resilience, absence and presence. In the photographic series, the sculptures extend the artist's body, acting as both physical and mental corsets, revealing the ambivalence of mothering.
Together, these three artists cultivate a conceptual garden, where artistic progress is not linear but cyclical and organic. Their projects are not fixed entities but dynamic landscapes, where ideas take root, branch out, and intertwine. The exhibition becomes a site of perpetual transformation — an ecosystem that is not merely displayed but continuously reshaped through next iterations.