Coinciding with his large-scale site-specific installation “Circulation” at Plus359 Gallery, located in the century-old water tower in Sofia, Latvian artist Andris Eglītis is showcasing an important body of works from the series “Earthworks” at Charta Gallery in parallel. In 2013, the artist received Latvia’s most prestigious visual arts award, the Purvītis Prize, for this ongoing series (2011-).
The exhibition brings together existing as well as new paintings, all made in Savvaļa, an outdoor art space that Eglītis and a group of like-minded collaborators founded in 2020 in the Drusti municipality in northern Latvia. Each year, like-minded artists as well as musicians gather for short residencies to build and create together outside an urban environment.
True to his philosophical and existential approach to painting that is rooted in a very intense observation of nature, this ongoing series of works is a repetitive exploration of materiality, executed literally with nature–covered with mud and earth, often with traces of being buried into the ground or left to the elements in the woods. A careful look at them – at their peculiar broad “strokes”, earthly tonality, and abstract nature – reveals the artist’s belief that this centuries-old art form can still be reinvented for a better understanding of our own liminal states of being, using that potentiality of things when painting, for example, has not yet become a painting. Eglītis also often experiments with the medium’s relationship to reality, using its slow nature to “document” installations or create real objects that, contrary to the attributed representative role of painting, imitates, on the contrary, the brushstrokes on the canvas.
Both projects can be seen from 16 and 17 October 2025 respectively in Plus359 Gallery first and then Charta Gallery in Sofia.
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).
