XXX

Red lipstick is the form that has occupied a visible and important place in the art of Sarmīte Māliņa. Experts of her works, most probably, associate it with the 1995 object “Language”, where the artist developed an arsenal of red lipsticks by placing them in a drawer of an antique glass box. The work in the collection of the Latvian National Museum of Art is one of the most pronounced examples of Latvian conceptual art and it is created in a ready-made technique.
Two years later, installation “XXX” was created for the 1997 group exhibition “Window/Mirror”, where a ready-made – a huge dummy of a lipstick seen in the shop window of a makeup store – was placed into a black, varnished mausoleum. These huge-sized lipsticks could be regularly observed in shop window decorations in late nineties and early two thousands, brought by capitalism to post-communist Latvia along with foreign brands. This lipstick is an evidence of the time, when consumerism rapidly changed the cultural environment of the time. From today’s perspective, some viewers could consider this evidence as comical or even mildly grotesque.