🎙️ On the evening of March 5, artist Roberts Rūrāns and designer Aigars Mamis will sit at one table and take turns interviewing each other – about work, faith, form and content, chestnuts and the Universe.

📅 Thursday, March 5, 6:00 PM
🎟️ Registration fee: 2 EUR, register here
🗣️ Event in Latvian

The conversation takes place while Zuzeum is showing the exhibition “Chestnut and the Universe,” where Rūrāns’s vivid illustrations meet quieter, spiritual explorations. This will be an attempt to continue the exhibition’s story through dialogue. We will talk about illustration, Christian symbolism, sacred art, and design, about how an image can live at once on a postage stamp and an altar, on a city poster and in a prayer book. About why medieval visual languages resonate in contemporary graphic design, and whether the role of design is only to “sell.”

About the participants

Roberts Rūrāns is an illustrator and artist, and a graduate of the Latvian Academy of Art. His works have been created in collaboration with major clients around the world, including The New York Times, Vogue, Hermès, the Tokyo Olympic team, AirBaltic, and NATO, where illustration becomes a clear, easily legible language between art and design.

Rūrāns’s visual style has developed by combining modernist flatness with the imagery of medieval manuscripts and sacred art – bright, clear forms, saturated colors, and layered narratives in which everyday humor appears alongside Christ, saints, angels, and demons. He works entirely in analog technique, painting with a brush and paint. His latest solo exhibition, “Chestnut and the Universe,” features more than 80 works and marks a turn from playful secular themes toward increasingly personal spiritual exploration.

Aigars Mamis is a graphic designer, co-founder of the branding studio Overpriced, and its creative director and lead. The studio works with brands whose visual identities are built on thoughtful strategy, storytelling, and symbolism, often highlighting local values and traditions – from collaborations with the Imants Ziedonis Museum and the foundation “Viegli” to city visual identities and the image-making of cultural institutions.

For Mamis, it is important that design is not only form, but also a way of sustaining and renewing cultural environments. He is actively involved in public discussions on design, has lectured at the Latvian Academy of Art and other higher education institutions, and in his projects often looks for intersections between religion, aesthetics, and everyday life — exploring how beauty, symbols, and tradition can work effectively in contemporary communication as well.

* By attending this event, you agree to have photos or videos of you taken for Zuzeum marketing purposes. You can refuse to be photographed or filmed by informing the photographer or cameraperson.