Early Works

An eccentric scrapbook documenting Ivars Gravlejs schooldays in Latvia during the 1990s. Aged 11, Gravlejs acquired a camera, soon deployed in unrestrained rebellion against authority – the small state of the school. Gravlejs writes, “I often felt nauseous before going to school because of the humiliation that I faced from my teachers. The only way to survive school was to do something creative - to take pictures and make movies.” Early Works satirises of the rules and aesthetic principles of the adult world. Eight sections trace the various phases of Gravlejs's encyclopaedic curiosity, including ‘Conceptual’, ‘Pop art’ and 'Actions', parroting the tropes of contemporary art, in emanations of the readymade (a pop art stockpile of soda cans), fake historical reconstructions (toy soldiers in battle) and surreal compositions (the erotic union of eggs and a sausage). In all the images, Gravlejs uses the gesture of art as an instrument of anarchy, lampooning his classmates and teachers in f