DOLLHELL

JĀNIS MITRĒVICS. DOLLHELL
26 February – 24 May 2026
Art Station Dubulti

At the core of the exhibition stands a doll derived from an industrially manufactured toy. This image refers humanity. ‘A Doll. A hellish doll. A doll hell. We usually play with dolls. The games may differ, but the doll is an extraordinarily accommodating model,’ says Jānis Mitrēvics. The figure of the doll appears in paintings, the artist’s principal medium, and, for the first time in his practice, in porcelain sculpture. The entire exhibition consists of new works created specifically for DOLLHELL.

Mitrēvics reflects on the world and art itself. His contemplation of the former unfolds through figurative generalisation: how society manifests itself, how an era reveals its character, how politics crystallises into symbolic images, colours and relationships. Today’s socio-political “bubbles” provide fertile ground for his imagery. The titles of the paintings and sculptures are concise – Choice, Gain, Stairs, Backwards, Instruction, Babel – naming the symbols, states or insights that propelled their making.

In Mitrēvics’ work, the world flashes past as a kaleidoscope of events and regulations, endlessly shaken by time into ever-new configurations. The painterly language is expansive and gestural, built on soft fields and classical colour relationships, yet nervous in its contrasts of darkness and light – dazzling, destabilising, refusing to settle. The apparent traditionalism of the technique is deceptive. Within the aerated, almost whipped expanses of paint lies a dry technological flatness: a digital image embedded where one expects drawing. DOLLHELL seems to revel in the free fall of its own complex aesthetic, in the headlong velocity of a narrative driven by intuition.

Choice is at once a consumerist imperative, a political necessity and a biblical – archaic – condition. One painting, depicting a female torso holding an apple aloft while partially illuminated faces observe her, bears the simple title – Choice. Within contemporary democracy, choice is compulsory: what to vote for, what to buy, who to be. Yet choice is also a theological category, foundational to Western ethics. You are free to choose, but the consequences are yours to bear. You live with what you have chosen. In this sense, the modern and the archaic conditions are not so far removed: we inhabit the outcomes of our decisions. Mitrēvics approaches choice as both contemporary and timeless – political and divine, outwardly critical yet intuitively profound. If we translate the painting’s visual language into words, the choosing subject – the figure we recognise from the Bible as Eve – appears compressed between two fields: a cool, lucid, rose-tinged reality and a murkier, seductively warm ochre promise of comfort. The most arresting insight may be this: in the moment of choosing, the human being is always “without a head”. Our decisions are guided by belief. The question is – belief in what?

Mitrēvics has long been drawn to emotionally charged, wide-angle observations of the world: human vanity, aspiration, confusion and the strange theatre of collective life. In DOLLHELL, he reaches for another timeless symbol capable of holding both the archaic and the present – the Tower of Babel. Since 1992, stairs rising to heaven have been a recurrent motif in his work – ambitious and tinged with irony. In the installations of the 1990s, these tower-like structures were often romantic and wooden. By contrast, in the large-scale outdoor work Erect 85 (1995), Mitrēvics appropriated a Soviet-era administrative high-rise sealing its upper windows with the words Erect 85. The gesture was playful and caustic. 

In Genesis, the descendants of Noah, instructed by God to spread out across the earth and multiply upon it, instead resolve to build a city with a tower reaching the skies, securing their name and resisting dispersal: ““Come,” they said, “let us build for ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens, that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of all the earth.”” (Genesis 11:4) God responds not with destruction but with linguistic confusion. Human pride is neutralised through misunderstanding.

Two monumental Babels appear in DOLLHELL: a vast four-metre painting on the ground floor and a porcelain installation above. In the painting, Mitrēvics lifts the viewer high above the commotion and the tower itself, in a baroque-like flight. The dominant hue lies between red and yellow – an assertive, almost confrontational orange. Dense figuration, frantic activity and a gravity-defying orbit around a pink cloud at the centre create a burlesque spectacle where humour and horror are hard to tell apart. For Mitrēvics, contemporary social bubbles resemble this biblical confusion of tongues: political vanity “rewarded” with near-caricatural misunderstanding. What is essence to one becomes nonsense to another. In the porcelain Babel upstairs, fired and glazed dolls replace burnt bricks, writhing upwards along the tower’s steps.

The small paintings titled Webcam work like eyes. Their title anchors them in the language of technological surveillance, yet the image of the all-seeing eye also carries older connotations of providence. Across the exhibition, fourteen paintings and more than thirty porcelain sculptures create a space where watching – and being watched – becomes inseparable from believing. (Porcelain sculptures have been produced in Piebalga Porcelain Factory, directed by Jānis Ronis.)

A crucial dimension of Mitrēvics’ practice is his sustained inquiry into painting itself. He understands his work as part of a lineage, situating himself within schools and traditions while recognising that art survives through constant self-disruption and renewal. ‘Since the 1980s, I have been building my own alphabet and grammar,’ he says. ‘I may have started with four dozen letters and discarded many along the way, but another two hundred and fifty have taken their place.’ Mitrēvics came of age at a moment when artistic languages were shifting dramatically, though not everywhere in the same way. He emerged as one of the earliest and most striking postmodernists in Latvian painting post-independence. Yet his artistic genesis unfolded under conditions radically different from those in the West, where the late 1970s and 1980s saw a turn away from conceptual austerity and modernist “purity” towards postmodernism. Meanwhile, behind the Iron Curtain, with Latvia still under Soviet occupation, artists were forced into partisan tactics working within the ideological chokehold of socialist realism. While the West embraced postmodernism – with the symbolic spontaneity of the Italian Transavanguardia, the German Neue Wilden and American “Bad Painting” –artists under Soviet rule continued to erode official doctrine through coded modernist strategies. This covert opposition had been the art world’s chief resistance strategy in Latvia and all of Eastern Europe post-WWII. Mitrēvics started off within that current. The shift came in 1991. Into his already recognisable expressionistic, chromatically intense and deliberately distorted figurative paintings, Mitrēvics inserted black-and-white photographic fragments of the classical painter Nicolas Poussin and scattered dried flowers across the surface (Marmalade. Poussin + Dried Flowers). With this defiant gesture, he stepped decisively into postmodern territory – among the first in Latvia to do so. The move aligned him with Western tendencies, yet paradoxically set him apart from the local art scene that was rapidly reclaiming the previously suppressed conceptualism and installation practices under the auspices of Rīga’s Soros Centre for Contemporary Art. At the same time, postmodern impulses had already surfaced beyond painting. From 1982 onwards, the group Workshop for the Restoration of Unfelt Feelings, founded by H. Lediņš and J. Boiko, pursued performances and Fluxus-inflected actions that expanded the field of artistic reference. Painting, by contrast, increasingly fell under suspicion in the 1990s – in Latvia as elsewhere. Mitrēvics took the opposite stance. He insisted on painting as a universal language – a base from which other materials and gestures could unfold. Even when working with alder branches, rope, leather, plastic, Soviet high-rises, ducks, text or video cameras, a painterly logic persisted. That commitment remains legible in the porcelain sculptures of DOLLHELL: they are conceived through the eye of a painter.

DOLLHELL engages directly with the architectural identity of Art Station Dubulti. Exhibition design: Dace Ignatova. Curator: Inga Šteimane. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Since the 1980s, Jānis Mitrēvics (b. 1957) has belonged to a generation of painters who reshaped Latvian art at the close of the independence movement. A defining early moment was the exhibition Gentle fluctuations in 1990, realised with Ieva Iltnere, Sandra Krastiņa, Ģirts Muižnieks, Edgars Vērpe and Aija Zariņa, and curated by Ivars Runkovskis. The project focused not only on finished works but on the act of making itself: the exhibition opened in an empty space, and paintings were created before the audience. Critics described it as a “theatre of painters”.

In the years that followed, Mitrēvics developed a distinctly postmodern language of reference and citation. Projects such as Marmalade (Poussin and Dried Flowers) (1991), Works (1992), ‘Jānis Mitrēvics Exhibits Vilhelms Purvītis…’ Ivars Runkovskis (1994) and Gymnastic Ring (1996) introduced a system where artworks pointed to one another, collapsing hierarchies between originals and quotations, between Purvītis and grain.

At the turn of the millennium, he shifted direction. A series of four solo exhibitions – Paris. New Reality (1997), Landscape. New Reality (1998), Nude. New Reality (1999) and Sin. New Revelation (2001) – marked a renewed engagement with reflected reality in painting.

In 2000, Mitrēvics founded the company Dd studio. For more than two decades, stepping back from individual artistic production, he focused on the modernisation and digital expansion of museum exhibitions. Under his direction, Dd studio realised over forty permanent displays in Latvia and abroad, including at the Ventspils Museum (2001), the Museum of Latvia’s Popular Front (2013), and the Anatomy Museum of Rīga Stradiņš University (2020). Their exhibition at the Gobustan Petroglyph Museum received the European Museum of the Year Award in 2013. Since 2021, Mitrēvics has returned to independent studio practice. In 2024, he presented the solo exhibition RE-EVOLUTION in Riga, gallery Māksla XO. 2022 brought him the Order of the Three Stars, the country’s highest distinction. DOLLHELL is his most ambitious solo exhibition of the 21st century.

ABOUT ART STATION DUBULTI

Since 2015, Art Station Dubulti (Jūrmala, Latvia) has operated as an inclusive and experimental platform for contemporary art. A space that has redefined how contemporary art can inhabit and activate public infrastructure. Rather than being repurposed from one function into another, the Dubulti station has evolved into a hybrid environment where passengers and gallery visitors coexist. This overlap has shaped a layered and inclusive cultural experience, integrating contemporary art into daily life for a broader public. The Station’s dual identity guides the curatorial vision of its founder and director, Inga Šteimane. Supported by the Jūrmala City Council and the State Culture Capital Foundation, the programme maintains a high curatorial standard with a strong local and international pull.

Exhibition dates: 26 February – 24 May 2026. Opening hours: Daily, 9 am – 6 pm. Admission: Free. Art Station Dubulti https://artstationdubulti.lv

Meet the artist and curator:
1 March, 2 pm
14 March, 2 pm (Jūrmala Spring Excursion Week)
15 March, 2 pm (Jūrmala Spring Excursion Week)
19 April, 2 pm

Support: Jūrmala City Council and the State Culture Capital Foundation

Text: Inga Šteimane, curator of the exhibition

JĀNIS MITRĒVICS’ ART WORKS IN “DOLLHELL”

1st floor

Atpakaļ. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 200 x 450 cm.

Backwards. Oil on canvas, digital print, 200 x 450 cm. 2025

Kāpnes. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 360 x 200 cm.

Stairs. Oil on canvas, digital print, 360 x 200 cm. 2025

Bābele. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 360 x 400 cm.

Babel. Oil on canvas, digital print, 360 x 400 cm. 2025

Izvēle. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 200 x 250 cm.

Choice. Oil on canvas, digital print, 200 x 250 cm. 2025

Pamācība. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 200 x 250 cm.

Instruction. Oil on canvas, digital print, 200 x 250 cm. 2025

Vebkamera 1. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 45 x 50 cm.

Webcam 1. Oil on canvas, digital print, 45 x 50 cm. 2026

Vebkamera 2. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 40 x 50 cm.

Webcam 2. Oil on canvas, digital print, 40 x 50 cm. 2026

Vebkamera 3. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 40 x 40 cm.

Webcam 3. Oil on canvas, digital print, 40 x 40 cm. 2026

2nd floor 

Glāze. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 160 x 150 cm.

Glass. Oil on canvas, digital print, 160 x 150 cm. 2026

Spēle. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 160 x 150 cm.

Game. Oil on canvas, digital print, 160 x 150 cm. 2026

Vecās mantas I. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 200 x 150 cm.

Old belongings I. Oil on canvas, digital print, 200 x 150 cm. 2026

Vecās mantas II. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 200 x 150 cm.

Old belongings II. Oil on canvas, digital print, 200 x 150 cm. 2026

Ieguvums. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 180 x 150 cm.

Gain. Oil on canvas, digital print, 180 x 150 cm. 2026

Saules stars. Audekls, eļļa, digitāldruka, 180 x 150 cm.

Sunbeam. Oil on canvas, digital print, 180 x 150 cm. 2026

Bābele. Skulptūra no piecdesmit porcelāna objektiem. Porcelāns, koks, grīdas segums, 600 x 600 cm. Porcelāns izgatavots Piebalgas Porcelāna Fabrikā.

Babel. Sculpture of fifty porcelain objects. Porcelain, wood, flooring, 600 x 600 cm. Porcelain made at the Piebalga Porcelain Factory. 2026

Contact information: Inga Šteimane +37129548719, steimane.inga@gmail.com