Ilgvars Zalans

Ilgvars Zalāns (b. 1962, Riga) is a Latvian visual artist working in painting, mixed media, and live action-painting performance. Trained at the Latvian Academy of Arts and the Riga Applied Art College, he has built an international career spanning more than two decades, including a 33-country world tour of action-painting performances since 2007 and exhibitions across the United States, Germany, Switzerland, Argentina, Japan, China, Indonesia, and South Korea.

Zalāns' current body of work, the Border Zone series, examines borders as conditions of tension, control, and transformation — using repetitive grid structures and deliberate material disruption to reflect on the fragility of systems of order. A related series, Silent Ukiyo, combines contemporary grid compositions with references to ukiyo-e woodblock printing.

In 2026, his work was included in a group exhibition at the Rothko Museum, Daugavpils, Latvia. He lives and works in Riga.