The acutely etched and smoothly rolled surfaces in Valda Batraks’ work suspend moments of reflection and awareness that echo across the textured landscapes of her busy, cerebrally vivid compositions. The collisions of light with darkness, self with environment, and form with identity all energize the faces formed by her pencils and lithography. Batraks bestows a glacial density to the patterns and physical properties of the contexts she confronts in her art, which ranges from powerfully sculpted collages of floating patterns and symbology in the spirit of Gustav Klimt to elementally stripped down, expressionist explorations into the impact of space and surroundings, where her choices of media challenge her surfaces and tones with ambitious studies of mass and dimension.

Batraks’ art has been showcased internationally in her native Latvia and around Europe, also earning several nominations and selection in the “International Print Biennial Awardees Theme” category at the Taiwan Art Fair in 1999. Her work was also selected for a Latvian Post Office postage stamp in 2003.