Parallel to his large-scale site-specific installation Circulation at Plus359 Gallery, housed in Sofia’s century-old Water Tower, Latvian artist Andris Eglītis presents a significant body of works from his ongoing Earthworks series at Harta Gallery. In 2013, the artist received Latvia’s most prestigious visual arts award—the Purvītis Prize—for this very series, which he began in 2011.
The exhibition brings together both existing and newly created paintings, all produced at Savvaļa, an open-air art space founded by Eglītis and a group of collaborators in 2020 in Drusti Municipality, Northern Latvia. Each year, artists and musicians gather there for short residencies to create and build together beyond the urban environment.
Faithful to his philosophical and existential approach to painting—one that emerges from an intense observation of nature—this ongoing body of work constitutes a continuous exploration of materiality, carried out quite literally with nature’s collaboration. The canvases are covered with mud and earth, often bearing traces of having been buried in the ground or exposed to the elements in the forest. Upon closer inspection, their characteristic broad brushstrokes, earthy palette, and abstract presence reveal the artist’s conviction that this centuries-old medium can still be reimagined in ways that deepen our understanding of liminal states of being—of that potential moment in which, for example, painting has not yet become “painting.”
Eglītis also frequently experiments with the relationship between painting and reality, using painting’s inherent slowness to “document” installations or to create physical objects that—in contrast to painting’s traditional representational role—imitate the very brushstrokes found on the canvas.
Installation view
Artworks
Earthworks
canvas, soil, clay, minerals, plants
83.5 x 90 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
33 x 24 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
67 x 75 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
65 x 75 cm
2025
Earthworks / 2025
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
42 x 42 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
65 x 75 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
240 x 185 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
185 x 160 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
240 x 185 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
240 x 185 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
185 x 145 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
90 x 60 cm
2025
Earthworks
plywood, soil, clay, minerals, acrylic
85 x 83 cm
2025
About the artist
Andris Eglītis (b. 1981) lives and works in Riga and at the open-air art space Savvaļa. Since 2008, he has presented more than twenty solo exhibitions and participated in over thirty major group exhibitions across Latvia, Belgium, Lithuania, the United States, India, Germany, and other countries. Most recently, in 2024, the Latvian National Museum of Art organized his major solo exhibition Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter.
In 2013, Eglītis was awarded the Purvītis Prize, Latvia’s most prestigious award for visual art, for his Earthworks series. In 2015, he represented Latvia at the 56th Venice Biennale with Armpit, a collaborative project with Katrīna Neiburga.
Eglītis has also designed sets for theatre productions and operas, and has completed major commissioned painting projects, including the ceiling of the Festival Hall at the Presidential Palace of Latvia (2020) and the iron curtain of the Latvian National Opera and Ballet (2023). In 2020, together with a group of like-minded collaborators, he founded the open-air art space Savvaļa at his studio in Drusti Municipality, where he continues to serve as one of its organizers.
About the curator
Snejana Krasteva is a curator and educator based in Sofia. She is a co-founder and co-director of the newly established Eastern Balkans Institute for Art and Architecture.
Between November 2023 and June 2024, she served as Director of Curatorial Programs at the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024; from June 2022 to July 2023, she was Chief Curator at the Luminous Art Foundation in Lisbon, and from 2013 to 2022 she served as Senior Curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art.
Raised between Bulgaria and Morocco, Krasteva received her BA in Chinese Studies from the University of Nanjing in 2004 and her MA in Curatorial Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2011.
Krasteva’s curatorial practice consistently adopts an interdisciplinary approach. Her recent exhibitions include Iv Toshain: Trousseau for Mars (National Gallery, Sofia, 2024), Luca Cvetkovic: Not Giving Up on Humans (One Night Stand Gallery, Sofia, 2023), Borjana Pektova: Burn, Burnt, Will Burn (Plus359 Gallery, Sofia, 2023), and Lars Nordby: Restaging Parallax (Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, 2022).
Joining the Garage Museum in 2013, Krasteva curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Spirit Labor: Duration, Difficulty and Affect (2021), The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics 2030–2100 (2019), Allora & Calzadilla: Graft (2019), The Other Trans-Atlantic. Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America between the 1950s and 1970s (2018), the first Garage Triennial of Contemporary Art (2017), NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL (2016), and Grammar of Freedom: Five Lessons (2015).
She has also realized large-scale commissioned projects with Erik Bulatov, Katharina Grosse, Yin Xiuzhen, Urs Fischer, Viacheslav Koleichuk, and Huang Yongping.
Krasteva has organized numerous events, including international conferences such as To Which Time Do We Belong? The New Historicity and The Politics of Time (2018), Where is the Line Between Us? Cautionary Tales from Now (2015), and Performance Art: Ethics in Action (2013).