For Daiga Grantina’s first museum exhibition in the UK, the Mead Gallery at the University of Warwick invited the artist to respond to its spaces and activate them with a selection of works spanning the past ten years. Grantina, who represented Latvia at the 2019 Venice Biennale and is building a catalogue of strong institutional presentations internationally, has rewarded the Mead’s generosity with a show that sparkles with ingenuity and wit. In this exhibition as in others, she takes on the gallery’s architectural particularities with an eye at once painterly and filmic. She plays on how perspective reconfigures our field of vision, and the dynamic potential of our movement through space as an active participant in its unfolding.
 



In doing so, she reveals a sculptor’s understanding of architecture as a container and ground against which sculpture is read in two, as well as three dimensions. Works which give the appearance of proximity from afar scatter apart as you approach; others that seem compressed into a single plane slowly unpeel into fore-, middle- and back-ground, until the simple act of pivoting reverses the picture, unveiling new layers to delight in.

For delight it is: responding to the three interconnecting and top-lit white cubes of the Mead Gallery – a design by Renton, Howard, Wood Associates completed in 1974, then smartened up by Ellis Williams in 2022 – Grantina brings everything into play, including weather and time. Depending on when you visit, the floors may be bathing in placid, unassuming daylight. Suddenly a cloud shifts, and those same floors burst into life, patterned with shadows bridging the crook between ground and wall, flooded and lurching with blooms from above. The spaces begin to dance to an entirely different beat, transporting you in their irresistible logic; for until you step back out into the world, you too are a player in this carnivalesque whirl of object and incident.




In common with her breakthrough exhibition What Eats Around Itself at the New Museum in New York (2020) and Toll at the Palais de Tokyo (2018), Grantina deploys her sculptures as elements in a mise-en-scène, with a disarming lightness of touch that belies great deliberation and attention to detail. Everything has been considered, from the indirect lighting set to glance off floors and onto the work, to the Mead’s sliding panels. Designed for painting exhibitions, here they have become framing devices set at intervals, in the artist’s words like “piano keys”.

Having woven you, the visitor, into the common ground of the show, a sense of reciprocity is activated: you have become a temporary variable in this ecosystem created by Grantina, an artist whose work meditates on transformation. Her symbolism is handled lightly – obliquely, even. She sets themes touching on the cycles of the natural world, and then leaves the experiential qualities of her materials to do the heavy lifting. The title of this exhibition, Lilacs, has a personal resonance, in that in Latvia (as well as here) the lilac flowers in Spring, and the show runs from now until June. It also suggests a palette, and shades of pinky-purple mingle through every room. In New York, her focus was lichen, an organism that establishes a mutually beneficial relationship with its host. A complete ecosystem, it survives often significant environmental stress by being acutely attuned and adaptive to the shifting conditions around it.




The works in Lilacs include three newly commissioned lilac portals, as well as several pieces from the New Museum exhibition, such as Hormé (2019). It looms above you in one of the dimmer corners of the gallery, a cluster of pendulous, belly-like pods, their pale skin stretched to the point of bursting. Crowned by a canopy of red felt, the work combines opposing elements – fabric, wood, spandex and latex – in such painstaking equilibrium that no sooner do you arrive at some accommodation with one, then the tension of the other takes over. Is this an animal organism, or the cup-like flower of some mutant foxglove? Close to eye level, a skein of skin beguiles you with its tactility until you notice the colours creeping in. The fleshy pinks and reds are recognisably animal; but speckled and veering into blues, they attract and repel in equal measure. Grantina can take you to the verge of disgust and the edge of mirth in the blink of an eye, somehow knowing just when to pull back and hold these paradoxes in suspense.

Grantina is skilled in orchestration, in placement and pacing. She makes herself comfortable with empty spaces, then punctuates them hither and thither with floating, oneiric forms. You are through the looking glass, in a realm with its own parallel and hermetic logic. Here is a River (2024), a concoction of wood, fabric and resin dissipating into a foam of scratchy metal mesh; here is a flash of iridescence from the wing of a butterfly or kingfisher (Joana’s Joy, 2024); here, a snatch of cloud. A Flaming Moon (2025) and an Egg Sky (2023). Gradually, the sense of being suspended in a parallel realm begins to take over.

Curiosity is constantly triggered: what is that, glowing over there? Let’s go and have a look.