Riga 2026

Artist: Polina Smirnova
Curator: Anna Moss

Polina Smirnova’s paintings appear as fervid visions: a mass of technicolour bodies, or horizons that merge with the apparition of a face. These seemingly dreamlike images are grounded firmly in real life experience. Playing Hooky takes its title from the colloquial phrase for being truant from school. Extended as a metaphor in the exhibition, ‘playing hooky’ is a way of bearing witness to moments of tension in everyday life: of being outside, looking in. Invoking a kind of psychic realism, the artist portrays common experiences with a highly expressive palette and use of layering. With daubs of fluorescent colour and gestural bodies that appear in constant flux, Smirnova highlights the point at which the ordinary becomes extraordinary. A sunset bike ride becomes a euphoric state, where the very outline of the composition is basked in the warm afterglow of not just the evening, but of physical exhilaration. In painting scenes of frenzied emotion, Smirnova captures the dual nature of intensity. Feeling overspills like paint, eluding control and shifting in real time. The same neon colour that signifies joy is accompanied by a sense of foreboding. A scene of revellers at a party, for instance, conveys both as much communal joy as it does claustrophobia. In a kaleidoscopic image of a dance floor, one central figure surfaces amongst a sea of legs, their face buried in their hands as they retreat on the ground in a state of overwhelm. Smirnova allows the coexistence of both abundant happiness and melancholia. One is left with the impression of hearing colour and seeing sound: a state of heightened senses closer to how memory rather than narrative functions. In her purposefully stacked canvases, one gets wonderfully lost in a myriad of painterly traces. Whether a day outside at the beach, or a crowded room, we find protagonists beyond figurative bodies. It is often states of mind, reified as a sun, a rainbow, or a strobe light, that intrude upon and intermingle with her subjects.