Traces

Latvian artist Andris Eglītis returns to Plus 359 Gallery, where he realized the large-scale, site-specific installation “Circulation” in 2025. For the current project, he presents a selection of “traces” from that installation alongside works from his major solo exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga (2024), continuing his investigation of painting as a field of encounter between control and chance, human impulse and the autonomy of matter.

The transformative force of the encounter between artwork and environment unfolds gradually as we ascend the water tower. On the first two levels, the power to evoke images is largely surrendered to external forces and surrounding materials: a series of canvases reconnects us with the October 2025 exhibition, when they were left to undergo slow and unpredictable transformation. Subjected to running water mixed with clay, dust, and other materials for two months, they did not merely occupy the space but evolved within it. This first group of works is followed by paintings from the series “Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter,” made in Savvaļa, northern Latvia, where canvases were buried in mud and snow, exposed to wind and rain, or worked with natural materials such as mud and dust gathered from the site of their making.

The final group of works takes an opposite approach to the environment, depicting landscapes “from outside” through observation and by following what catches the eye. Part of the ongoing series “Common Place,” these works were produced during the artist’s expedition through Eastern Europe, painted in motion on a specially constructed structure mounted on his car to support an easel. Depicting seemingly mundane landscapes—sewage systems, small-town churches, panel housing blocks, and lakeshores—the series quietly negotiates the tension between the human drive toward classification and judgment and immediacy, speed, and impulse.