Acrylic paint strokes that are holding cut-out drawings on the wall blur boundaries between drawing and sculpture, abstraction and representation. A line is a recording device for a wandering imagination. It flows and curls, hides under the rocks, looking for a new path through the darkness. (Maija Kurševa)

For Maija Kurševa, drawing has always been at the bedrock of the artist’s ideas, and it also functions as the method of taking notes of thoughts that pop up on a daily basis. In her new exhibition FAIR COPY, the artist continues to explore ideas of abstraction and spatial drawing, creating collages of paper cut-outs and acrylic brushstrokes. Her aesthetic choice is a striving for purity, order, and clarity – qualities that resonate with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of artistic practice as a strategy for confronting chaos. Her works are graphic, beautiful, and meticulously executed gestures, open to interpretation. The formal methods she employs invite the viewer to an affective perception, free from literary overlays.

Maija Kurševa’s line works are minimalist and seemingly abstract – they give the impression that the artist has traced the contour of emptiness, creating a sinuous transition from stillness to movement, from form to immateriality, symbolising limitation and disappearance, tension and release. (Urszula Usakowska-Wolff, 29.04.2022)

Maija Kurševa (1981) works across drawing, spatial structures, installations, moving image, and printmaking. Her works and exhibitions have been repeatedly nominated for the prestigious THE PURVĪTIS AWARD. In 2022, during the international paper art fair PAPER POSITIONS Berlin, Maija Kurševa received the PAPER ART AWARD for her series “Black Lines”, an award given to women artists to highlight a unique approach to contemporary works created on and from paper. In 2021, her drawings were included in Phaidon’s significant anthology dedicated to contemporary drawing: “Vitamin D3: Today’s Best in Contemporary Drawing”. Maija Kurševa graduated from the Art Academy of Latvia, Department of Visual Communication (2008). She was co-founder and editor of Popper Publishing (2012–2018), and also initiated and curated the Riga Zine Festival (2016, 2018). She has participated in international artist residencies, including Kai (Tallinn, Estonia, 2020), ISCP (New York, USA, 2019), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris, France, 2019), and IASPIS (Umeå, Sweden, 2013). Since 2004, her works have been exhibited both in Latvia and abroad. In 2025, she participated in the 19th Tallinn Graphics Triennial (Tallinn, Estonia), the EDEN International Art Festival (Kim?, Riga, Latvia), and the MABOCA Festival (Madona, Latvia). Maija Kurševa lives and works in Riga. She teaches composition and screen printing at the Art Academy of Latvia within the programme: Movement. Image. Sound. Her works are included in public collections: the Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga, Latvia), the Latvian Museum of Contemporary Art Collection (Riga, Latvia), and the VV Foundation Collection (Riga, Latvia).