Femme Forte

In her upcoming solo exhibition, Femme Forte, the artist Sabīne Vernere – previously known for working primarily with black pigments – turns toward vivid colour, taking inspiration from the sun itself.

The colours of sunrise and sunset emerge from the interaction between short and long light waves and the Earth’s atmosphere. In Vernere’s new works, this optical phenomenon becomes a metaphor for women’s voices and histories. When the sun sinks below the horizon in the evening, its light enters the atmosphere at a more acute angle and, so, must travel a longer distance to reach the Earth’s surface. As a result, blue light scatters and disappears, while the red light remains. In Femme Forte, a light blue tone marks the more delicate forms of the feminine as the saturated colours of twilight symbolise voices growing stronger through resistance.
A similar analogy of revelation is offered by the aurora borealis, in which invisible solar winds meet the atmosphere to create intense colours. Layered greens, pinks and purples evoke the way individual stories converge into a shared spectrum. Forming at the threshold between cosmos and air, the aurora mirrors Vernere’s spirals that depict a liminal space signalling transition.

Through this luminous palette, Vernere invites us to imagine empowering examples of women’s self-realisation – stories that are scarce in recent Baltic history. There have undoubtedly been women who led successful creative and professional lives despite the obligations and constraints placed upon them. Yet these successes often came at the expense of personal well-being. Many women from the past century ended their lives alone and in poverty or were worn down by political repression or illness. In contrast, the representations of the female in Vernere’s new works are imbued with an energy captured in the braided anatomy of joints and tissues and ready to burst out. Alongside them, enlivened figures are already moving, striving forward and upward. And there are also supple, tender hand- or budlike forms tentatively exploring the surface.

Where did this search for female role models begin? During her doctoral studies, Vernere researched the most famous of femme fatales – the Sirens, Medusa and Pandora. These ancient Greek heroines embodied sexuality and power, only to be met with revenge, punishment and hurt. Vernere’s attention was drawn to the unjust suffering these figures were forced to endure because of their seductiveness. She also became interested in the assigned female guilt that runs through mythological narratives and, in particular, how these foundational texts of European cultural history, written by men, reveal a deep-seated fear of female sexuality. She wanted to understand why it continues to be suppressed and misrepresented, and why victims are still blamed. These archetypal figures became a lens through which to examine how anxieties surrounding female sexuality persist in contemporary post-Soviet Eastern European society.

Alongside her academic research, these ideas simultaneously took shape within Vernere’s artistic practice. In her early ink and egg tempera paintings, she freed the female body from its constraints, allowing sensuality and strength to emerge through abstraction. These works deconstructed and transformed parts of the female body. Although presented in dramatic black pigment on white paper, the bodily form itself remains fluid, playful and gentle – through these depictions, Vernere brought forth the curiosity and vitality inherent in women. Both Vernere’s earlier practice and her new, hopeful visions shape our understanding of free women. We witness figures who move forward with purpose to carve out lives of creativity and beauty. 

Vernere paints these vivid images with seriousness and quiet conviction. She embraces classical techniques and materials – egg tempera, ink, bronze, oil paint, marble and oak – yet also transforms them, uncovering new forms of expression through her contemporary, female perspective. Figurative, colour-rich painting, long pushed to the margins of the art world, is once again finding its place alongside other contemporary artistic forms. Unafraid of being dismissed as illustrative or naïve, Vernere’s Femme Forte intervenes not only in the commentary on social processes but also in the internal dynamics of the art world itself. As the elements and scenography of the gallery space suggest, the exhibition is capable of shifting multiple perspectives at once, in a single, decisive gesture.

Text by Maria Helen Känd

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You can also read the doctoral thesis Female Monsters by Sabīne Vernere, defended in 2025 at the Art Academy of Latvia.

BIOS

Sabīne Vernere (b. 1990, Kuldīga, Latvia) is a Latvian artist living in Riga. She is known for her expressive Indian ink paintings depicting anthropomorphic, gender-fluid beings. There is a strong presence of beauty, sensuality and emotion in the artist’s works, but also disturbance and violence, a juxtaposition that correlates with the complexities of the dynamics between humans and nature.
Vernere works as the head of the experimental art space Pilot at the Art Academy of Latvia. She holds a doctorate in Visual Art and Design from the Art Academy of Latvia (2025), as well as a Master’s (2018) and a Bachelor’s degree (2016) from the Painting Department of the same institution. She has furthered her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp.
Her recent solo exhibitions include BESTIARIES at the Lithuanian Artists’ Union Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2025), FEMALE MONSTERS at ASNI Gallery, Riga, Latvia (2025), Dealing Temptations. Sirēnas at MABOCA Gallery, Visuma Center 2, Madona, Latvia (2024); ANGLES MORTS at the Artists’ Union of Latvia Gallery, Riga, Latvia (2023); Sirens, Medusa and the Isle of Lotus-Eaters at Kuldīga Artists’ Residence, Kuldīga, Latvia (2022).
Recent group exhibitions include To Collapse or to Collaborate at the New Garden Gallery, Paris, France (2024), In the Name of Desire at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia (2024); Don’t Cry! Feminist Perspectives in Latvian Art: 1965–2023 at the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia (2023); Triquetra at Kogo Gallery, Tartu, Estonia (2023).
Kogo Gallery has presented Vernere’s works at contemporary art fairs ArtVilnius’25 and viennacontemporary 2024, she was chosen as the Best Young Artist of ArtVilnius’25.
Her works are a part of the collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art, VV Foundation, the Zuzāns Collection, Signet Bank and SEB, as well as private collections in Estonia, Latvia and elsewhere in Europe.
Sabīne Vernere is represented by Kogo Gallery.

Maria Helen Känd is a curator and critic whose work engages with socio-psychological themes, inviting audiences to reflect on the subtle agreements that underpin social structures and the complexities of identity. In recent projects, she has adopted a more intuitive curatorial approach, creating poetic constellations of works by artists who share formal affinities and explore mythological and archetypal motifs.

Känd currently works as a project manager at Tallinn Art Hall and was previously a curator and project manager at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). In 2021, she was awarded a scholarship in art criticism by CCA Estonia and the Estonian Association of Art Historians and Curators.

Her recent exhibition projects include Trigger (2024, co-curated with Evelyn Raudsepp), The Laugh of the Medusa (2023) at EKKM, and ars viva – agents of perception (2022) at Kai Art Center. Känd studied film, theatre and media science at the University of Vienna and received her bachelor’s in cultural theory and comparative literature from Tallinn University. She is currently studying for a master’s in curatorial studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts. 

TEAM

Artist: Sabīne Vernere
Curator: Maria Helen Känd
Production: Liina Raus
Communication: Karin Kahre, Else Lagerspetz
Installation: Siim Asmer, Johannes Säre
Photos: Marje Eelma (views), Nele Tammeaid (opening)
Text: Maria Helen Känd
Graphic design: Aleksandra Samulenkova
Language editing and translation: Refiner Translations

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FUNDERS

The exhibition is funded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia and the City of Tartu