Cradle of the Old Masters, and host to some of the globe’s oldest and most revered museums, Western Europe has long been established as ground zero for fine art.

From Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and its giddying collection of Dutch Golden Age paintings, to Rome’s historic Capitoline Museums and Saint Petersburg’s vast Hermitage, the amount of continental real estate dedicated to the arts is staggering.

Yet Europe’s hubs of contemporary art are decidedly less defined, with some of the most promising avant-garde scenes hidden in little-explored pockets.

Old city, new wave

Enter Riga. Increasingly dubbed the ‘Berlin of the Baltics’, and home to countless art spaces, the beauty of the Latvian capital’s offering is in its diversity. Small, boutique galleries and impressive museums are strewn throughout the city, hidden away down the cobbled, medieval streets of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Old Town; housed on boats moored in the Daugava River; and tucked behind the ornate walls of the city’s 800-plus art nouveau buildings (Riga boasts the highest concentration of art nouveau architecture anywhere in the world).

A panoply of materials are showcased here too, with entire galleries dedicated to objets d'art fashioned from glass, silver or peat, and museums devoted to Latvian ceramics and textiles.