Kārlis Padegs

Kārlis Padegs was born on 8 October 1911 in Torņakalns, workers district of Riga.

He once wrote in the newspaper that just this outsider who dreams about Narcissus and the perverse madonna does not forget the invalid. He shows him side by side with the fashionable Dorian Gray, the lover Don Juan, but why?- Because of sharp contrast, to make even the most dim-minded people understand that the world in World War I has already lost 12,996,117 people killed and 5,669,000 disabled people who have not died yet, and we do not want new victims.[1]

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  My Babe from the Street (1930).
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  Self-portrait (1932).
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  Mr. Padegs and the Astral (1939).
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  Five o'clock in the morgue (1935)
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  Cabaret (1935)
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  Funeral of the unknown soldiers (1939)

Since the exhibition mounted in 1933 Kārlis Padegs art became an expression of unpleasant, even ugly traits opposed to the tendency towards beauty in Latvian art. Padegs once said: "I must often listen to reproaches- why do you draw such disgusting pictures when there is so much beauty in the world?- But there are also many abominable things and somebody must draw them too, I answer. I want to show the seamy side of life which we do not like to see in order not to spoil our feeling of comfort or our good appetite".[2]

Padegs' famous Madonna with Machine Gun (1932).

Commemorative plaque devoted to Kārlis Padegs at Elizabete iela 24, Riga

Kārlis Padegs died in Riga, April 1940 from tuberculosis. He was 28 years old.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Kārlis Padegs.

• Kārlis Padegs at Virtual Art Gallery