Ivars Grāvlejs, Kateryna Berlova
Ivars Grāvlejs (born in 1979) is a Latvian photographer born in Riga who lives and works in Prague. He completed his master’s degree at the Department of Photography at FAMU in 2007 and doctoral studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague in 2021. He is the head of the photography studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FAVU) in Brno. Together with Kateryna Berlova, they have formed an artists’ union, Dirty Romantics.
Having had more than 40 solo exhibitions worldwide, Grāvlejs is known for his social critique and ironic viewpoint, which are usually portrayed in his provocative multimedia artworks. His work pushes the boundaries of the language of photography in an attempt to challenge the rules of rationality and order – an approach that owes much to the art movements of Dada and the 1970s and 1980s German conceptualism.
Grāvlejs’s works have been exhibited at such venues as Tate Modern, London, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin and the Photo London 2019 festival at Somerset House. In 2015, a monograph of Ivars’s early works was published by Mack (London). His works can be found in the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol; the Thomas Mailaender Collection, Paris; the European Patent Office, Munich; the Latvian National Museum of Art; the Latvian Museum of Photography; and Zuzāns Collection, Riga.
Kateryna Berlova (born in 1986) is an artist born in Dnipro who lives and works in Berlin. She studied art at Mykhailo Boichuk Kyiv State Academy of Decorative Applied Arts and Design.
In 2016, she was a resident of The Royal Standard Gallery, Liverpool, UK. In her artistic practice, Berlova works with motifs of repetition and trauma, considering the latter an imprint of time or a visible trace of its presence. Her videos often capture repetitive, monotonous or obsessive actions representing failure. Starting from her own experience, she eventually goes far beyond it. Berlova often taps into methods of heightened perception, discovering the surrounding world through smell, sound or touch. She works with video, sound, painting, installation and site-specific art. Together with Ivars Grāvlejs, they have formed an artists’ union, Dirty Romantics.
Ivars Grāvlejs