Karlīna Mežecka’s exhibition Stare Up At Me

Borrowing its title and dramaturgical undercurrent from Madonna’s Don’t Tell Me (2000)—a country-pop hallucination of suspended desire, emotional stasis, and erotic ambivalence, punctuated by the lines “Tell the bed not to lay / Like the open mouth of a grave / Not to stare up at me / Like a calf down on its knees”—Karlīna Mežecka’s largest solo exhibition to date unfolds in four chapters: Life, Death, Dominance, and a closing Summary.

Through a series of new sculptural and installation-based works, Mežecka foregrounds bodies that appear as unstable figurations, suspended between surface and interior, between what is materially present and what remains imagined.