Cluster Index Information

Indriķis Ģelzis’ works can be interpreted as landscapes of algorithmic realism. Most often, they take the form of architectural paintings and implosive sculptures that map the ever-complicated relationships between human beings, nature and technology. At their center is the post-medial tension between the linear and the spatial, the system and the fragment, information and experience. These kinds of dualities, unified opposites and conflicting similarities inform both the thematic concerns of Ģelzis’ works and the nuances of their form. Indriķis Ģelzis is interested in imagery based on an inquiry into object-oriented ontology, the cyborg aesthetics of which are accompanied by an anxiety linked to fragility and entropy, an awareness of the fleeting nature of all that exists. It is a poignantly romantic form of contemporary claustrophobia, a feeling generated through everyday information superstructures by surveillance capitalism and our increasingly quantified selves. Ģelzis’ artistic language seeks to capture the world around us as a truth independent of human perception; he imitates technological mechanisms as self-sufficient entities, searching for and emphasizing the similarities between biological and mechanical bodies. The rhythm of the fusions between angles, corners and textures is subjected to a flow of anthropomorphised forms, a dynamic in which the curves of statistical data are no longer distinguishable from the cardiograms of heartbeats, since in this version of reality the hybrid constructions of mechanics and the imagination merge into a single steel-cold breath. / Santa Hirša


Artist Talks

2015 — "Stage, Scale and Surprise: John C. Welchman and Indrikis Gelzis in Conversation". Art Museum "Riga Bourse", Latvian National Museum of Art