Karlīna Mežecka

Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to present Leave Me Where I Lay, a presentation of new glass and ceramic sculptures by Latvian-born, London-based artist Karlīna Mežecka. This exhibition is organized in collaboration with Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, where Mežecka recently presented Stare up at me. This marks the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

Mežecka’s sculptural practice encompasses ceramics, glass and metal. The artist’s novelle technique of joining ceramic and glass was borne out of a desire to reconcile two distinct crafts in a singular composition. The process begins with an unglazed ceramic form, manipulated directly by the artist’s hand. Glass is subsequently blown through the openings and cavities, allowing the organic shape to be guided by the curvature of the ceramic. Like the Soviet auteurs who used water to convey intimacy under censorship, Mežecka’s fluid glass forms hint at a vulnerability that has survived the ceramic’s hardened grip. The resulting marriage of materials is a product of both control and circumstance; the finished composition possesses an innate tension between what is impressionable and what is fixed.

Installed across three short lightbox plinths varying in height, the works in Leave me where I lay are intended to be viewed through a downward gaze. For closer inspection, a viewer must maneuver their body around the lightbox, towards the sculptures, bending and crouching in a dance between subject and object. At certain vantage points, the organic forms begin to embody nearly corporeal shapes—a skull, an organ, a hand, a vein—that then slip into abstraction. Plasticity and constraint are let to co-exist like a frame in a memory. In a medium that is rigid, hard and strict, Mežecka achieves a sense of flexibility and movement that is synonymous with youth and vitality. The finished sculptures oscillate between dynamism and stativity, preserving the state of transformation in which they were made.

Mežecka (b. 1995, Riga, Latvia) lives and works in London, UK. She received her MA at the Royal College of Art in Ceramics & Glass, London, UK (2022), and formerly received her BA at the Art Academy of Latvia in the Ceramics Department, Riga, LV (2020). She has had solo exhibitions at Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, LV (2026 & 2024); Low Gallery, Riga, LV (2022); and was invited by The Sculpture Quadrennial to present a commissioned installation for their 2020 edition, Triumphs of Democracy. Mežecka’s work is in the notable collections of the Odunpazari Modern Museum (OMM), Eskisehir, TR; the VV Foundation, Riga, LV; the BTA Collection, Riga, LV; and the Roche Collection, Riga, LV.