Miervaldis Polis: Keyhole to Paradise. An Egocentric's Wanderings
May 8 – September 1, 2025
“An egocentric – it’s irony about human nature, not its glorification. It’s irony aimed at oneself, not at something else.”
— Miervaldis Polis
The exhibition “Keyhole to Paradise. An Egocentric’s Wanderings” by Miervaldis Polis focuses on the artist’s travel notes across time and space, where he (or Līga Purmale) has posed among giant colossi – ruins of ancient civilizations, wandered through Venice, America, and foreign paintings – present both in Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat and greeting Napoleon Bonaparte in the Alps. As Polis himself says, “At any moment I could ‘escape’ to any century, to any place.”
A keen observer and deliberate provocateur, Polis first appeared on the streets of Riga in 1986 clad in the skin of the Golden Man. He doesn’t call it a performance, but rather a show: “It starts with the body, with emotions, with the whole human essence, and ends with an installation that, in its nature, is also a performance. Just a show with accessories.” It was both self-expression and a desire to explore the surrounding reaction – “What will they say when I show up like this?”
In the Latvian art scene, Miervaldis Polis is also well known as a portrait painter. However, this exhibition will feature only one portrait – the only one in which the artist fully surrendered to all his drives and passions. A well-known figure is catapulted into a world where Rembrandt and his young wife Saskia, Velázquez’s dwarf, Titian’s girl with a fruit tray, Boucher’s odalisque, Teniers’ dog, and characters from Ingres’ Turkish Bath all gather in one place.
“My work as a whole – my life, and therefore my art and everything connected with it – is driven by something that could roughly be called an instinct. (...) I don’t separate my life from art, I don’t prioritize one over the other. They exist in constant interaction of cause and effect. The way I paint is the way I live,” wrote Miervaldis Polis in a 1987 self-interview for the magazine “Māksla”.
Curators: Una Meistere, Daiga Rudzāte
Exhibition architect: Martins Vizbulis
Graphic design: Krišs Salmanis
