04.03.–22.03.2026
The exhibition is open to visitors free of charge during the museum’s opening hours.
From 4 to 22 March 2026, Zuzeum Art Museum’s Greenhouse presents a retrospective of Andris Grinbergs’s performative practice, based on materials from the Zuzāns Collection and the personal archives of the artist, as well as his recent creative partners Dāniels Šatalovs, and Kaspars Zborovskis.
Andris Grinbergs (b. 1946) is one of the most significant figures in the history of the Latvian avant-garde. The trajectory of his life and artistic practice is marked by periods spent in Riga, Mazirbe, and again Riga, combining the position of an independent artist with a deliberate distance from any ideological system.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he became a central figure in Latvia’s small hippie community. His performances and happenings, addressing themes of religion and sexuality, constituted a rare and courageous expression of counterculture in Soviet Latvia. These artistic events were not improvised acts, but carefully structured works of art with scripts, direction, scenography, participants, and a distinct fashion aesthetic, in which cinema, dance, literature, music, and visual art converged. Many important photographers documented these events, including Gunta Andersone, Māra Brašmane, Jānis Deinats, Andris Eglītis, Andrejs Grants, Atis Ieviņš, Raimonds Ivanovskis, Jānis Kreicbergs, Gatis Rozenfelds, and Inta Ruka.
Grinbergs’s interest in performative art began in childhood through theatre games and dressing up, but it took a professional turn at the Riga School of Design and Art, where he studied garment construction and developed his distinctive, elegantly eccentric image. His aesthetic reveals affinities with Oscar Wilde’s aristocratic persona and with the icons of 1960s New York Pop Art, particularly Andy Warhol.
During the Mazirbe period and later, alongside his artistic practice, Andris Grinbergs worked as a drawing teacher. Over the course of eighteen years teaching in boarding schools, he implemented alternative and creative pedagogical methods.
Today, working together with the younger artists Dāniels Šatalovs and Kaspars Zborovskis, Grinbergs consistently refuses the exploitation of a public persona, instead emphasising self-sufficiency and the inviolability of private space as essential principles of both his life and his art.
❗️18+
Please note that exhibition artworks include motifs of erotic and sexual nature. We do not recommend the exhibition to museum visitors who are younger than 18. Museum visitors under 18 years of age must be accompanied by an adult to enter.