Miervaldis Polis: A Keyhole to Paradise. The Wanderings of an Egocentric
Exhibition at the Ola Foundation in Riga / On view from May 9 till September 1, 2025
“The egocentric person is an irony of human nature, not a glorification of it. It is about being ironic concerning oneself, not something else.” So says artist Miervaldis Polis – who currently lives in the countryside near Kuldīga and no longer participates in public events – during our telephone conversation. His previous life in Riga was a stark contrast to that of today, as he was one of the shining stars of the Latvian art scene up until the early 2000s. He could almost always be found sitting at a table at the M6 café, a popular haunt of artists up until its closing in 2003. Painter, performance artist and theorist – one could say that he purposefully created his life as a performance. This was the case both during his public walks as The Bronze Man, arguably his most well-known work, as well as beyond. Polis even famously appointed himself a member of the nobility and set up his own memorial room in the most prestigious art space of the time, Rīgas galerija. He loved to play pool, and is even rumoured to have been a professional casino gambler for a while.
Miervaldis Polis is undoubtedly one of the most striking and peculiar personalities in Latvian art history of the second half of the 20th century. This exhibition focuses on a particular facet of Polis' oeuvre, seeking to explore his beloved “utopian realism”, the routes of his wanderings, and the characters he encountered while there; it concentrates on his “spectacle”, as he himself terms the genre of performance.
Polis’ emergence on the Latvian art scene was impressive and – in the context of the era – shocking. His 1973 work Car and House has been called the first example of photorealism in the Soviet Union. This fusion of photorealism and fantastical visions resulted in notes on travels in both time and space. There were giant colossi in the shape of fingers – ancient cultural ruins in front of which the painter himself or Līga Purmale were posed. Polis freely “wandered” around Venice, America, and the paintings of others. He travelled in time, space, and his own fantasies.
The term “photorealism” was the right one in the early stages of my creative work. But this period lasted for only a year. After that, I returned to what I call academic realism. Or what the French call trompe d’oeil and the Russians call obmanka. I also used to be called a conceptualist. Once postmodernism came into fashion, I was called a postmodernist. I have also worked in what can be called utopian realism. I painted a book – in a single copy. I created a pictorial myth about a non-existent island on which Līga Purmale and I travelled around through paintings, discovering the ruins of an ancient culture – giant colossi in the form of fingers. I played with illusions. I painted myself into ancient reproductions and cities. I really wanted to travel, and at that time I couldn’t. That’s why I painted myself in Venice or somewhere in America. That's how I travelled, and it's how I fulfilled myself.
The transitions between periods in Polis’ creative work were fluid and seemingly imperceptible. In 1975, he met Bruno Vasiļevskis and Maija Tabaka at the youth art centre in Dzintari.
Like all young people, I wanted to be in the avantgarde and in opposition to everything that had come before. For two years, without Bruno Vasiļevskis himself being aware of it, I studied his art. And not only that – I imitated his movements, his voice... Hyperbolically speaking, one could say that I identified myself with him to the point that I became him. I painted very strangely during those years; many of my works were thoroughly similar to Vasiļevskis’ paintings. In fact, by imitating him, I understood his perception of art – just as I understood photography through imitating it.
In the 1980s Miervaldis Polis turned to portrait painting. However, he admits that “young people don’t understand many things, and my experience at that time was apparently not sufficient.” This period was short, but in the early 1990s he returned to portraiture (in between these two periods he began to repeat himself, bringing everything to the point of finesse, to absolutism), and it became one of the most significant points of reference in his painting.
Photo: Didzis Grodzs
Polis created a series of portraits of well-known public figures and became, in a sense, a court painter. In the narrative of this exhibition, we will only cover one of these works – the 2004 portrait of Latvian tycoon Ainars Gulbis, which combines all of Polis’ drives and inclinations by fusing utopian realism, portrait painting, and a passion for appropriating the spaces and images of other painters. In the painting, the businessman is catapulted into a world where Rembrandt and his young wife Saskia, Titian’s Girl with a Platter of Fruit, Boucher’s Blonde Odalisque, Teniers’ dog, and characters from Ingres’ Turkish Bath have all come together. The portrait is not unlike Dante’s Divine Comedy, with Purgatory ultimately embodied by the 2017 ceremonial burning of the original painting as organised by the portrait’s commissioner – an attempt at cutting himself free from addictions through sacrifice to Fire. Consequently, only a reproduction of the painting can be exhibited in this exhibition – a print of the original, as taken by Normunds Brasliņš.
The fact that images influence us in our daily lives – I agree with that. There are people who have had their portraits, painted by me, taken down from the wall. People are very emotional. But it’s not worth thinking about what is important and what is not. Because it's not up to me. How many works by great artists have not been lost? Does the world stop because of it?
Returning to Miervaldis Polis’ manipulations with his image, it must be said that painting and performance have always been tools with which he has tried to find himself and his world by applying various philosophies and styles to his art (or vice versa). In 1986, the Bronze Man campaign took place, the course of which was documented in detail by artist and photographer Atis Ieviņš; the Alter Ego centre was also founded that same year. In 1991 Miervaldis Polis and Vilnis Zābers organised a performance – dedicated to the upheavals of the region’s political system at the time – in front of the Laima Clock in Riga City Centre. Zābers, wearing a tubeteika hat, sold regular sunflower seeds for rubles, while the Bronze Man sold “gilded” sunflower seeds for dollars. The duo of Zābers and Polis also organised a show at Latvia’s most famous art gallery at the time, Kolonna, where they celebrated the opening of an art exhibition without any works of art in it, thereby proving once again that Polis has always been more interested in the reaction of those around him than anything else.
My work as a whole – my life and, therefore, art and everything else connected with it – is determined by something that could be roughly called “drive”. [...] I do not separate my life from art; I do not put one above the other. They are in a continuous interaction of cause and eect. As I paint, so I live.
Quotes from an interview with himself, written by Miervaldis Polis, in the magazine Māksla (Art) in 1987.
Photo: Didzis Grodzs
Works featured in the exhibition are from the collections of Jānis Zuzāns, Guntis Belēvičs, and Ainars Gulbis.
Curators: Una Meistere, Daiga Rudzāte
Exhibition architect: Martins Vizbulis
Graphic design for the exhibtion: Krišs Salmanis
