Uldis Pīlēns’ Anniversary Solo Exhibition
U.P. THE OTHER SIDE
Starting October 5, the architect and entrepreneur Uldis Pīlēns’ anniversary solo exhibition U.P. THE OTHER SIDE can be viewed at the Ola Foundation cultural space. For the first time, it brings together in one exhibition works created during his Bauhaus studies in Weimar, stage design, and his latest paintings, revealing a line of creative thought that has continued throughout his professional career.
Uldis Pīlēns (b. 1956) is best known to the public as an architect and the founder of the UPB holding company. The exhibition focuses on a less visible aspect of his creative work. From his personal archive, it presents posters, photographs, watercolors, drawings, and architectural sketches created during his student years in Weimar. The exhibition also includes stage design materials created for the Liepāja Theatre and his latest paintings, which the artist calls his color meditations.
Uldis Pīlēns’ years of study in Weimar (1976-1980) hold special significance in his creative biography. The Bauhaus legacy became for him a way of thinking that encourages one not to remain within the boundaries of a single discipline and to view space, people, materials, color, and ideas in relation to one another. Precision and freedom, the rational and the intuitive, do not exclude one another in his work. This approach can be recognized both in his early works and in his painting, where the architect’s eye encounters color, rhythm, and surrender to the process.
The exhibition takes place at Ola - one of Uldis Pīlēns’ most personal architectural works. His completed architectural projects are deliberately not exhibited, but architecture is present as a way of thinking and as the very space in which the works are displayed.
Sculptural works have also been created for the exhibition. In the Ola garden, a 1.80-meter-high polished metal sculpture, “Ola”, will be on view, while at the center of the exhibition, the sculpture ‘’Becoming’’- another, smaller egg, seemingly the same form but split open, is exhibited. This crack becomes one of the exhibition’s most important signs. It is neither a defect nor the end of the form. It is an opening, a moment in which the closed form ceases to be closed and space emerges for something new.
U.P. THE OTHER SIDE is one point on a much longer axis of time. It is not about what is finished, but about what continues to change. It is accompanied by Uldis Pīlēns’ philosophical text “Form Follows Consciousness”.
The exhibition can be viewed from October 5 to January 9 at the Ola Foundation, 12A Ogļu Street, Riga.
Creative team: Ilze Pīlēna, Aleksejs Beļeckis, Estere Betija Grāvere, and Sandra Strapcāne.
