Selected works from series Almost Perfect
Paintings, 2012
I can’t really tell why I started to think about railway sleepers. At one point I thought I just need to have them. There was something about them that struck me as right and necessary (well, actually, I could speak about materiality, footprints of time, social significance etc., but that kind of thing would be neither exhaustive nor precise). I decided to just get them, bring them to my place in Drusti and then I would see what to do with them. I began to ask around about where I could get them. But it all turned out differently – I often travelled to Ghent in Belgium and spent a longer period of time there. One morning I arrived at a hardware store 15 minutes early. Waiting for it to open, I walked around the nearby train station and suddenly ran into a perfect stack of railway sleepers, even better than the ones I had imagined. (A.E.)
Downshifting? I have always had the feeling that one has to hurry to find time for peace, since one needs to be at peace to be able to work (with that I mean creating art work or – even more importantly – preparing for creating an artwork). Lately the feral laboratory in Drusti has served as a suitable place for work. It is place without electricity - there is no real shelter, only leftovers of buildings that used to exist there. It is a place that stimulates consideration of appropriate models of functioning: does the reduction of consumption mean turning away from technology, or the contrary? To what extent should we be self-sufficient in the sense of being able to do everything by ourselves, or should we focus on being good at one thing? Does slowing down mean isolation?
Artist's Bio:
Andris Eglītis is a painter, whose works have recently been expanding into three dimensional art objects. He graduated from the Janis Rozentals Riga Art High school and the Department of Painting of the Art Academy of Latvia, where he currently works as a lecturer. Eglītis has studied in a post-academic programme at HISK in Ghent, Belgium. Since 2005 Eglītis has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, and has organized eight solo exhibitions, nearly each of which has been acknowledged as a meaningful event in the art world. The starting point of the works of Eglītis has always been reality transferred into art via classical genres – portraits, still life and landscapes. Yet in almost every series of work the artist makes use of a different method or technique. Beginning with photorealistic and neo-academic forms, in recent years Eglītis has begun to use natural materials to depict not just an illusory, but also a physical, three-dimensional ‘life of things”, through which, in his own words, he “tries to understand the ungraspable – to reconcile the self, the little man with the rest of the world –society, history and the universe”.