From October 8, the artist Roberts Koļcovs’s jubilee exhibition “The Inertia and Pull of Silence” is on view at the Ola Foundation cultural space. It features mainly works created over the past year - paintings and sculptural objects that bring together the artist’s characteristic precise line, the human body, nature, and mythological figures.
Silence in the new exhibition is neither emptiness nor a pause. It becomes a space in its own right, with its own intensity, movement, and inertia - an environment in which form and content can emerge. As the artist himself puts it: “Even stillness has inertia. Silence is loudness.”
In structuring the exhibition, Roberts Koļcovs continues to explore the principle of polarity that is central to his work - the tension between opposites, the balance and pull that persist even as one moves from one pole to the other. This relationship is expressed both in the works’ content and in their formal language, which brings together the human body, the plant world, myth, the rhythm of graphic lines, and various materials.
Unlike the artist’s other exhibitions, this one does not include ink drawings on paper - a medium that Koļcovs himself considers one of the foundations of his practice. Canvas works using ink and acrylic are shown alongside spatial objects - sculptures made of welded and ground steel.
For Koļcovs, form is not an end in itself - it is a tool for approaching content. The titles of his works serve only as signposts, leaving viewers space for their own perception and interpretation.
Roberts Koļcovs is one of Latvia’s most distinctive and recognizable artists, whose creative journey began in the late 1980s. He gained wider recognition as one of the founders of the art collective “Passive Decadence,” while developing his individual style over the years in printmaking, painting, and sculpture. His work reflects a keen interest in the human body, nature, rhythm, line, and the ability of form to become an independent bearer of meaning. His significance in Latvia’s art scene was also affirmed by the major solo exhibition “The Botanist and the Unicorn” at the Latvian National Museum of Art.
