Intricate connecting lines flow through Indriķis Ģelzis’s sculptures, installations, and drawings. The Riga-based artist grew up in the post-Soviet moment, the son and grandson of prominent architects who helped to shape Latvia’s built environment, so it’s not surprising that his work harnesses line and geometry not only to organize form, but also to convey information, both concrete and abstract. Using materials as disparate as wood, textiles, steel, and mirrors in his freestanding and wall-mounted sculptures, he manipulates complex linear armatures, which can be porous or rigid, into arterial paths that trace the relationships of humans, nature, and technology through the play of anthropomorphized forms, textural details, and hard angles.
A candidate for the Latvian National Museum of Art’s 2025 Purvītis Prize for emerging talent, Ģelzis
has exhibited his work across Europe, as well as in solo presentations at New York’s ASHES/ASHES and Polina Berlin Gallery. “Bingo Gaze” (2024), his recent solo show at Polina Berlin, featured four freestanding sculptures in which sinuous lengths of steel circulate around, structure, and support clusters of open ovoids and spheres. Near-figures, these works fuse the organic and the mechanistic into strange, networked hybrids that recall Venus flytraps or cyborgs. Though the presentation appeared straightforward at first, a timed RGB-based light and sound work periodically darkened the gallery, engulfing the sculptures and altering their appearance, while a voice intoned a series of short, cryptic statements and questions pertaining to the human condition.
No matter the medium or presentation of Ģelzis’s work, his linear infrastructures conjoin visible and invisible, living and virtual systems, to consider how information is computed and communicated and how the conveyance of such information shapes us. We are always tethered by transmission lines that structure our lives into webs of experience, both digital and physical, and Ģelzis explores that condition by considering the dualities and interconnections between line and space, materiality and immateriality, probability and chance, the built and the biological worlds.
Leah Triplett: Let’s start off by talking about the various processes that you use. You draw digitally, weld, carve, manipulate technology, and create videos. How do you describe your practice?
Indriķis Ģelzis: I’m currently working within the realm of sculpture, creating pieces that either stand
on their own weight or press against the wall, shifting between three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms. . .
. . . Subscribe to print and/or digital editions of Sculpture to read the full article.
