Photo reportage from the exhibition 'A Detective by the Sea' by Ēriks Apaļais at the Warsaw Gallery Weekend

October 11, 2024
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Kim? Contemporary Art Centre was taking part in the 14th edition of Warsaw Gallery Weekend, one of the largest contemporary art fairs in Central and Eastern Europe. The event showcased 43 exhibitions across 37 galleries in Warsaw from September 26 to 29, with Kim? representing artist Ēriks Apaļais.

For more than a decade, artist Ēriks Apaļais has explored the bounds of autobiography. This interest in the desire to retroactively construct one’s identity through narrative steeps his paintings in the semantics of self-reflection. ‘A Detective by the Sea’ offers a constellation of memory objects, floating recollections that conjure the atmosphere and inner workings of the Riga-adjacent Babīte parish, where the artist lived during the turmoil of the post-Soviet 1990s as well as his current residency in the coastal resort town of Jūrmala. Reinterpreted in the deliberately childish style of fairy tales, the memories depicted in these paintings—many attached to building snowmen in the yard—combine symbols found in nature with more personal elements. Predetermined by cultural and personal context but stripped of didactics, this new body of work suggests more than it directly expresses.

Ēriks Apaļais (b. 1981) mainly works in painting and has participated in international exhibitions since 2008. Selected solo exhibitions: Mailbox No.12, Gallery 427, Riga (2023), Family, Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga (2020), Inscribed Silhouettes, Galerie Vera Munro, Hamburg (2014). Group exhibitions: An Average Comet, gallery Harkawik, NYC (2024), Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, Riga International Biennial Of Contemporary Art, Riga (2018), Stolichnaya and Snowmen, Art Cologne, Cologne, Germany (2018), Dedication, Exploitation & Haute Collaboration, Silberkuppe Gallery, Berlin (2017). The artist has been awarded the Karl H. Ditze-Preis for best diploma, the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg, Germany (2011) and DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) award for excellence. In 2011 has was nominated for Ars Viva 11/12 prize. Ēriks Apaļais has received master’s degree in arts from the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg as a student of Prof. Andreas Slominski, Germany (2011).

Warsaw Gallery Weekend is the largest event in Poland dedicated to contemporary art, and one of the leading reviews of new art in Central and Eastern Europe. WGW allows you to see the art world from a different perspective – not through the prism of museums and cultural centres, but where art is alive and contact with artists is direct. This year’s art festival will once again be extended to include a programme of accompanying events, allowing even more people to access free culture.

Photography: Monika Ciepłucha