Exhibition. Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination & Matter.
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.
‘Exhibition. Some Instances of Encounters between Imagination and Matter’ is supported
by the European Union NextGenerationEU program and the National Recovery and Resilience Plan.
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).