Jana Brike was born in year 1980 in Riga, Latvia, a small country in the North-East of Europe. She has studied academical painting in the Art Academy of Latvia and received M.A. degree in year 2005. She has exhibited her work internationally in professional venues since 1996 while beeing still a young teenager, and has had 12 solo exhibitions and nearly 100 other projects and group exhibitions all over the world. Her main interest is visual art with a strong narrative and depiction of a figure, mostly using the traditional medium of oil painting on canvas, but also drawing, animation, mixed media sculpture, installation and digital art.
Her inspirations for work has been as diverse as: folklore fairytales, children book illustrations, imaginative soviet animation films and supernaturally realistic classical painting; the colorful forbidden rare secret imagery of the western pop culture surrounded by mystical, almost religious tone for the soviet children; the terrifying war and deportation stories that her grandparents, and their little brothers and sister witnessed as small children; pompous alienated eerie atmosphere of the catholic church ceremonies in the Latvian countryside, and the breathtakingly beautiful ballet performances in the opera house, where she was taken since the age of two, as well as others. – all the bitter-sweetness and irreality of the every day.