Plus 359 Gallery is pleased to announce the major site-specific installation “Circulation” by Latvian artist Andris Eglītis. A conceptual artist exploring the various liminal ways of being in the world, Eglītis works with painting as a medium in an expanded field. He is known for his masterful handling of both monumental and miniature scales of painting, as well as for his ingenious engineering skills in constructing structures that range from his own large open-air studio in the woods, theatre and opera sets to systems for producing epic-scale works, often executed collaboratively and literally with nature.
“Circulation”—an immersive installation created specifically for the century-old water tower in Sofia—is inspired, on one hand, by his expedition earlier this year across Eastern Europe and by the clashing feelings of familiarity and exoticism he experienced. Connected through water sources around which cultures have historically formed, the Balkan region today still appears caught in the post-socialist dichotomy of periphery and centre. Translating these experiences into matter, over the past few weeks, Eglītis has been working in a studio in Lukovit, northern Bulgaria, where he has been collecting and combining found and traditional materials, clay vessels, and placing them in various “situations” where matter and natural forces exist in precarious relationships.
About the artist
Andris Eglītis (b. 1981) lives and works in Riga and at the open-air art space Savvaļa. Since 2008, he has held more than twenty solo exhibitions and participated in over thirty significant group exhibitions in 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, he received the Purvītis Prize, Latvia’s most prestigious visual arts award, for his Earthworks series. In 2015, Eglītis represented Latvia at the 56th Venice Art Biennale (with Armpit, together with Katrīna Neiburga).
Eglītis has also designed sets for theatre performances and operas, and has created commissioned paintings for the ceiling of the Festival Hall of the Latvian President’s Palace (2020) and for the iron curtain of the stage at the Latvian National Opera and Ballet (2023). In 2020, Eglītis and a group of like-minded collaborators founded the outdoor art space Savvaļa in his studio in the Drusti municipality, where he continues to serve as one of its organisers.
About the curator
Snejana Krasteva is a curator and educator currently based in Sofia. She is co-founder and co-director of the newly founded art institution Eastern Balkans Institute for Art and Architecture. She was Head of Curatorial programs at Diriyah Contemporary Biennale 2024 (Nov 2023-June 2024), served as Chief Curator at Luminous Art Foundation, Lisbon (June 2022–July 2023) and Senior Curator of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (2013-2022). She grew up between Bulgaria and Morocco, received her BA in Chinese studies from the University of Nanjing, China in 2004 and her MFA in Curatorial studies from Goldsmiths College, London, in 2011.
Krasteva’s curatorial practice is consistently cross-disciplinary. Recent exhibitions include Iv Toshain: Trousseau for Mars, National Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (2024); Luca Cvetkovic: Not Giving Up on Humans, One Night Stand Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (2023); Borjana Pektova: Burn, Burnt, Will Burn, 359plus Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (2023); Lars Nordby: Restaging Parallax, Institute of Contemporary Art, Sofia, Bulgaria (2022). She joined Garage in 2013, where she curated and co-curated exhibitions such as 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 1950s to 1970s (2018); the first Garage Triennial of Contemporary Art (2017); NSK: FROM KAPITAL TO CAPITAL (2016); Grammar of Freedom: Five Lessons (2015), among others. She was initiated and realized large-scale commissions with artists Erik Bulatov, Katharina Grosse (all in 2015), Yin Xiuzhen (2016), Urs Fischer (2016), Viacheslav Koleichuk (2018) and Huang Yongping (2019). She has organized a number of international conferences including the 6th Garage International Conference 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).