Janis Avotins - Implicated

In The Attachment, our new room, we are showing a premiere for the Netherlands: Janis Avotins (1981) from Riga, Latvia. The themes of Avotins’ paintings are loneliness and alienation. Scenes from books by Kafka and Dostoyevsky or references to a collective memory seem to turn up in these paintings. According to Avotins, the loneliness that his work expresses emphasizes the vulnerability of the individual who is oppressed in our modern society. To show this, all references to time and place are omitted from these works. There is nothing that points to a chronological process or to an identity of the figures in them. Everything centres around the depiction of the fragile human condition. What is striking about Avotins’ work is the immaterial character of the scenes that seem to take an eternity or a second. Faces remain unrecognizable because Avotins considers the expression on a face to be too personal and too intimate. In contrast, hands are very present. Janis Avotins feels an affinity in his method of painting for the Lithuanian-American painter Vija Celmins and he acknowledges the influence of Werner Herzog and Deimantas Narkevicius in his own oeuvre.

Janis Avotins studied at the Janis Rozentals School of Fine Art and at The Latvian Academy of Art from 1999 to 2003. He has had several exhibitions at IBID Projects in London and in Vilnius and at the Johnen Galerie in Berlin and the Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle in Munich.Avotins had a large retrospective in the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany in 2008. This year he will show his work at the Vilnius Painting Triennale in Lithuania.

Janis Avotins
Implicated