Media tour:
Ojārs Ābols. Man’s Absurd Projects on Earth
On Friday, 9 January 2026, at 11.00 the Latvian National Museum of Art invites mass media representatives to the press tour of the exhibition Ojārs Ābols. Man’s Absurd Projects on Earth.
Venue:
Main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art /
Great Exhibition Hall (-1st floor)
Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1, Riga
Registration of participants:
10.30–11.00
Nowadays, painter and art theorist Ojārs Ābols (1922–1983) is seen as an avant-gardist of the 1960s–70s, a leader of theoretical thought, the driving force of the Painters’ Section at the Artists’ Union, godfather of Latvian contemporary art. The exhibition, which will be on view in the Great Hall of the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art from 10 January to 10 May 2026, offers a multi-layered view of the artist, whose creative and political biography reveals the tension between conformism and non-conformism, between the Soviet system and the wish to get closer to Western world.
In his works, the painter 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 who had been 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’ destiny and the shifts in his art, the exhibition also looks back at Latvia’s complex history.
Exhibition supporter:
