Chronologies
Ieva Astahovska

Group exhibition in the Republican House of Science, Riga

Keywords: abstract art applied art pop art

This exhibition was the first visible event in Riga in which direct Western influences and the linking of art to a sense of real time were manifested. Participants were a group of like-minded artists studying design, interior design, and textile arts at the Art Academy.

The exhibition had an innovative, experimental arrangement. The central object was Henrihs Vorkals’s spatial tapestry Icarus, in which colorful circles and crescents united a human figure’s inner and outer worlds, allowing it to be interpreted as a target, victim, or struggle. The exhibition’s second strong accent was Jānis Borgs’s super-graphic in which the cartoonish label “Sviuuu …” was placed over an abstract geometric base. This was complemented by similar silk screens, sketches, paintings, and posters scattered around the perimeter of the circular hall.

The exhibition was popular and attracted both controversy and praise. Its organizers later acknowledged that it was intentionally imitating Pop art, noting that “Pop art was everywhere”—in design, interiors, fashion, on record covers, and in musical taste and lifestyles. As written in a review of the exhibition, it was a period of “the universe, electronics, a dynamic living pulse, shifting information requiring heightened intellectuality where earlier intuition and emotions had sufficed.”[1]

[1]

Georgs Barkāns, “Izstāde svētku noskaņā” [Exhibition in a Festive Mood] in Padomju Jaunatne (6 February 1972)

Date: 1971

Participants: Jānis Borgs, Atis Ieviņš, Laimonis Šēnbergs, Arvīds Priedīte, and Henrihs Vorkals.

Location: Republican House of Science,  Riga