Man's Absurd Projects on Earth
From 21 November 2025 to 22 March 2026, the exhibition Man's Absurd Projects on Earth, dedicated to the work of the painter Ojārs Ābols (1922–1983), will take place in the Great Hall of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1, Riga).
The life and creative work of painter and art theorist Ojārs Ābols (1922–1983) passed during the occupation of Latvia and was inevitably tied to political certainties. Ābols was an erudite intellectual, a long-time board member of the Artists Union and head of the painters' section (1973–1981), he gave passionate speeches about art and believed that art has an important role in the development of civilisation. In his works he dealt with the current issues of his time. Ābols' activism, the development and transformation of his views on art is a story about a young man obsessed with communist ideals changing and becoming an important practitioner and theoretician of modernist art and even an instigator of conceptualist art in Latvia. Tracing Ābols' biography and shifts in his art, the exhibition also looks back at Latvia's complex history.
Ābols' youth was closely shaped by social-democratic ideas. From 1935 to 1940 he was an active member of the Workers' Youth League of Latvia, which, following Ulmanis' coup, had to work underground. He received his first artistic education in the studio of the left-leaning Latvian modernist Romans Suta in Riga (1939–1940), where he acquired an affection towards constructivism and cubism. When the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, he became an agitation and propaganda worker in the Communist Party (1940). During the war, Ābols studied cultural agitation in the Soviet Union, attended courses for trade union employees, worked at the Central Committee of the Art Workers' Trade Union in Moscow, in 1944 he enrolled in the State Institute of Theatre Arts in Moscow, yet, with the war ending, the Soviet authorities promptly dispatched him to work in Latvia. Ābols returned to Riga full of youthful energy and optimism, ready for the building of an idealistically-conceived future and became a member of the Communist Party (1947). Yet he exchanged the career of a party worker for art. He enrolled in the Art Academy of the Latvian SSR, graduating in 1951 from the Monumental Painting Studio of Otto Skulme (1889–1967), continued his studies in the postgraduate school in the Leningrad Repin Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, earning the degree of candidate of art sciences. The exhibition also includes Ābols' early “orthodox” socialist realist works created in the 1950s, which were devoted to the “historic struggle for the victory of communism”.
Ojārs Ābols' spouse Džemma Skulme has said: “As artists we began developing very late – only in the 60s.” With the 1960s, free artistic choices appear in Ābols' work – figural expressionism, abstract expressionism, conceptual painting cycles. These brave artistic choices were sparked by contact with Western art. Artist and art historian Taira Haļapina wrote in 1969: “He is among those leading personalities which grow and develop in a constant argument, dispute with themselves.” In 1956, as part of a delegation of Soviet cultural workers, Ābols together with Džemma Skulme went on a journey around Europe on a cruise ship. Having been on the other side of the Iron Curtain and having encountered real modernism, his views about art radically changed. The turning point in Ābols' career is Blacksmiths from 1962 – a figural 'severe style' composition painted in broad gestural strokes and a forceful expressive manner. The critics could not accept it. In 1963-1964, a campaign against modernism was carried out in the Soviet Union and Ābols was also criticised for “formalism”, several works were rejected from exhibitions. Yet in the mid-1960s, Ābols even arrived at an entirely abstract form of expression, inspired by the art of the French abstractionist Pierre Soulages (1919–2022). During his life, not a single personal exhibition of Ābols' work took place in Latvia, yet he actively participated in artists' group exhibitions. The artist was interested in global processes and the role of man in them. He dealt with showing tension and counterforce, energy, movement, active space in painting. Ecology, military conflicts – the artist also saw the monuments of antiquity and ancient history faced with threat and destruction. Ābols' concern for the Earth was pacifist, it ran deeper than the Cold War propaganda slogan “struggle for peace”. In the 1970s, he set out on several conceptual cycles, turned to the threat of the nuclear arms race (Hiroshima; Estimate of Nuclear Destruction), the ideas of Greenpeace were reflected in the cycle Processes on Earth, even his still lifes were conceptual, commenting on poor taste, narrowmindedness and the cult of wealth (Anti-Biedermeier; Merchants' Renaissance). Meanwhile the so-called Aesop's language, widely employed in art during the occupation, can be found in still lifes with carpenters' workbenches reduced to abstraction where vice are a symbolic message about the existential shackles placed on man by the political conditions.
Ābols also was a theorist and art critic, in the 1970s becoming one of the most erudite knowers of Western art in Latvia. Following his trips abroad, he eagerly shared his impressions with colleagues. In 1976, having returned from the Venice Art Biennale, Ābols proposed the exhibition Nature. Environment. Man (1984) which would critically address the relationship between man and the environment. This exhibition caused an explosion of contemporary art in Latvia. Towards the end of his life, the artist envisioned the cycle Man's Absurd Projects on Earth, which he did not get the chance to realise.
Curator of the exhibition Elita Ansone