"Cut-outs" (2023)
Installation, collages
"Cut-outs" is a kind of souvenir shop – an exhibition of souvenirs. Liene Pavlovska's paintings and collages include wood incrustations by carpenter Jānis Pavlovskis, made in the souvenir workshop of the collective farm “Ādaži” in the 1980s, often used for official representation purposes, as well as religious works made privately and quietly at home as gifts for his mother. "Cut-outs" are paintings and collages made from wooden material stored in the attic of Jānis Pavlovskis' house – rolls of leftover leather from the souvenir workshop's main export product – portraits of Lenin. Working with partially cut leftover materials, the artist arranges them in new combinations.
"Cut-outs" is a processual work reflecting on the generation that was young in the seventies and eighties – a generation that was prepared for the Soviet system, but instead resisted, created, and integrated into a new system of social organisation; also about the generation of the artist's parents. "Cut-outs" is a work that explores how conformity is reconciled with everyday acts of resistance and a process where the artist seeks and tries to understand the imprints of this same unlived past, which she and other families carry within themselves.
Liene Pavlovska is a visual artist who thinks and works in interaction with space. Her work is based on an interest in patterns of socio-economic order, the collective expectations that arise from them and how they determine how people and other beings live together.
/ Photo credit: Kristīne Madjare / Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art