Leave me where I lay

Polina Berlin Gallery is pleased to announce _Leave me where I lay_, a presentation of new glass and ceramic sculptures by Latvian-born, London-based artist Karlīna Mežecka. On view from September 17 through October 24, this exhibition is organized in collaboration with Kim? Contemporary Art Centre in Riga, Latvia, where Mežecka recently presented _Stare up at me_ (June 18 - August 9, 2026). 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.