Roman Korovin - Saturday, Sunday

Paul Calligaro, Inc. is honoured to present Saturday, Sunday the first solo exhibition in France by Roman Korovin (b. 1973), one of the most acclaimed artists in Latvia and the winner of the 2025 Purvītis Prize, the country’s highest biennial artistic distinction.

The exhibition brings together a selection of paintings made over the past fifteen years.

Roman Korovin paints with the simplest of means: a few oils, a brush, a surface. His compositions are reduced to essentials: a line, a point, a fragment of light. He observes and records the things that surround him, ordinary objects, passing gestures, and the unremarkable arrangements of daily life. The paintings often appear playful or slightly absurd, yet they remain anchored in a precise attention to perception.

For over two decades, Korovin has worked almost exclusively with diptychs and triptychs, painting the same motif several times with only minute variations of tone, framing, or light. These repetitions generate sequences of near-identical images, in which difference is suspended between recognition and doubt. From this “almost nothing” arises a form of radically reduced narration, “the shortest stories ever,” as the artist calls them, where the event consists solely in the shift of seeing itself. Between two images unfolds what Korovin names “the zero state,” a zone of suspension where nothing seems to happen, yet where time, perception, and memory become suddenly perceptible.

Bor n in 1973, Roman Korovin is a leading figure of Latvian contemporary art and the recipient of the 2025 Purvītis Prize, the country’s highest artistic distinction, awarded by an inter national jury chaired by Nicolas Bourriaud.

His work has been shown at the Latvian National Museum of Art, the Mark Rothko Art Centre, and the Survival Kit biennial, among others.