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ZEBRASTRAAT GALLERY, GHENT (BELGIUM)
LINAS JUSIONIS "STACKS, PLANTS AND PLAINS", 2019On March 28th, “Zebrastraat” opens a new solo exhibition by the well-known young-generation Lithuanian artist Linas Jusionis. Jusionis has been making his mark on the contemporary Lithuanian art scene for almost a decade now, focusing his attention more and more on the law of the ‘the eye’s desire’ often devalued in the maelstrom of contemporary intellectual trends.The title of the exhibition, Stacks, plants and plains, helps to create a mood close to that of a road-trip film and refers to elements of landscape, presenting them as recurring motifs in the artist’s work. Unconnected landscapes with no clear meaning join into a sequence devoid of any logic, misleading in its aestheticized muteness and transmitting a strange, nostalgic mood. The recurring landscape elements seem to start gaining significance and working like tropes. Even if every motif signals something distinct, all of them together act like certain objects of desire.
Jusionis’s painting work has been characterised by a mature consistency: a mysterious visual outlook being formed with minimalistic tools, balancing between observing and being observed, (not) showing and (not) seeing. Unexpected, intriguing solutions in the formation of a painting’s space, as well as sophisticated colour transitions disclose a conscious preference for pure visuality and its experience, acquiring an ever greater importance for the artist himself.
“I find pure visuality, disassociated from any kind of meaning, more and more seductive because of its authenticity and a sheer desire for imagery. On the other hand, I have always been interested in an image’s duality when it can remain mute and, at the same time, provoke interpretation. This duality is the keystone when thinking of an image. Any painterly solution of mine comes into being as a response of one kind or another to it, sometimes elaborating on the concomitant associations, and sometimes trying to avoid them altogether, seeking to affect the viewer with pure visuality”, says Jusionis.
In his latest paintings, the artist gives way to strong imagery and its dual truth: by depicting something or pretending to be something, the painted view also directs attention to itself, that is to say, issuing an invitation to enjoy an illusion that engages the eye and the mind and plays unexpected tricks on the viewer’s imagination. The objects to be seen in the spatial expanses of the paintings are like manifestations of the artist’s libido, erupting in a sterile, strictly organised and aestheticised space. A painting is the realisation of the artist’s desire for imagery, and a polemical space of tensions, different moods and signifiers.
Linas Jusionis (b. 1986) studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2007–2011, earning a BA and graduating with a Master’s in Monumental Arts (Fresco-Mosaic) in 2011. The artist has been exhibiting his work in group shows as well as individually since 2009, exhibition Stacks, plants and plains already has been his fourth solo one at Vartai Gallery. Almost from the very beginning of his career, Jusionis began to gain a whole host of admirers throughout Lithuania, with his paintings having been acquired by MO Museum in Vilnius and the Lewben Art Foundation, as well as private collectors in Lithuania, Belgium and abroad.
Jolanta Marcišauskytė-Jurašienė
Funded by Consulate of Lithuania Ghent, Ministry of Culture of the Republixc of Lithuania, Lithuanian Council for Culture, Baltisches Haus
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Triumph gallery, Moscow
Group exhibition19.07.2019 – 29.09.2019
Represented Artists:
Deimantas Narkevicius
Andrej Poolukord
Egle Ridikaite
Emilija Skarnulyte
Triumph Gallery, National Centre for Contemporary Arts, Arsenal and the Embassy of Lithuania in Russia in collaboration with the Lithuanian Culture Institute ang Gallery VARTAI presented the 10th exhibition in the EXTENSION project, covering current Lithuanian art scene. "EXTENSION.LT: Parallel Narratives" featured over ten contemporary Lithuanian artists.
EXTENSION has traditionally invited artists working in different media and addressing different issues but always connected within a common context where stylistic and thematic diversity attains a shared meaning. In case of EXTENSION, this context originally came from geography of a given art scene. This has shaped the project and its aspiration to highlight different local schools, whereas its serialized structure made the audience predisposed to look for dialogues between the schools. At EXTENSION.LT the national and geographical context is upstaged by a more general idea: the relation between people and history, and formations of new identities.
Lithuania, as part of Eastern Europe, has been influenced in a major way by different empires and other countries throughout its history. Lithuania today experiences a new growth of the problem of national identity; with that, the issues of national identity, conceptualization of historical trauma or achievements have regained their relevance among contemporary Lithuanian artists and writers. The subtitle of the exhibition points to an established literary device, that is, nonlinear narrative, which usually provides several points of view with parallel plots. This approach has informed the group show, where a multitude of perspectives creates a space for a discussion on historical memory and formation of new identities through means of contemporary art.
The exhibition comprises works by different generations of artists who tap into large sets of temporal and historical contexts. They share, however, a common attitude to art and artistic reflection on time.
Working in different media, the artists make installations, video, drawings and paintings. Each work is a diverse collection of ideas and parallel narratives, yet the main focus is still on the individual with their subjective perception and evaluation of events.
The exhibition is structured as "parallel narratives", where each artist contemplates individual historical events, facts, traditions of the past, present and future.
Specially for this exhibition in Russia, one of the most renowned Lithuanian artists Žilvinas Kempinas is going to make a prototype of his new artwork, "Matryoshka of War", fashioned as the well-known type of Russian doll where each smaller unit fits inside a larger one.
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IKON gallery, Birmingham (UK)
Žilvinas Kempinas23 09 — 27 11 2016
Ikon presents a solo exhibition of work by New York based Lithuanian artist Žilvinas Kempinas. Comprising a number of installations it is characteristically elemental, representing and embodying natural phenomena such as light and the circulation of air, with an emphasis on movement made by both visitors and kinetic works in the exhibition.
Kempinas’ work involves unprecious everyday objects and materials, and he is most renowned for using unwound videotape. It appeals to him not only as an ‘abstraction’ of moving imagery, but also because of its distinct physical qualities.
Ideas of movement, in its pure kinetic state or as a trace of movement that has already happened, are developed through the artist’s work. His new installation, made especially for Ikon, involves an upside-down video projection of a ride through forested landscape, a mass of metal rods (tripods) painted white and arranged on a high gloss black floor. It combines viewers’ movements through the space and formal density to result in a controlled environment that is immediately disorienting. Characteristically Kempinas is playing a smart aesthetic game, sharing something that is as wonderful as it is real.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, including an essay by New York based writer Jessica Holmes. Visit Ikon’s online shop for the full range of Ikon’s catalogues and limited editions.
This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Galerija Vartai and is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Photo: Stuart Whipps
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Reykjavík Art Museum
Zilvinas Kempinas: Fountains14.09.2013 - 05.01.2014
In 2011, Zilvinas Kempinas created a stand-alone sculpture made of strands of magnetic tape vigorously propelled by the force of an industrial fan. The fan is placed face down in the centre of a circle. Since air can only escape from the sides of the fan’s round, metallic frame, it is thrust outwards by the spinning blades, making lengths of black magnetic filament flutter and sway outwards toward the edge of a ring – like waves crashing against a shoreline, or swells of water ebbing and flowing against a barrier. A sculpture in a “non-traditional” sense, with its random transformation of magnetic tape changing its physical form, transcending the material and the piece itself into a fourth dimension that portrays a sense of time and movement in space.
In this exhibition, Kempinas amplifies the irregular oscillations of the magnetic tape into the installation Fountains, using an ensemble of fans. He treats each entity as a unique variable, and iterates it to manifest an identical reality. It is a universe with apparent likenesses that alter themselves in time and space.
Zilvinas Kempinas was born in Lithuania in 1969. He graduated from the painting department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1993, and received his MFA in combined media from Hunter College in New York City in 2002. In 2003, after his solo exhibition at the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, he was invited to participate in a series of exhibitions in both the United States and abroad. He received the Calder Foundation’s Calder Prize in 2007, and represented Lithuania at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. He lives and works in New York City.
The exhibition is a part of the Cultural Program of the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and organized in cooperation with Galerija VARTAI in Vilnius.
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REYKJAVÍK ART MUSEUM
Tomas Martišauskis: Creature14.09.2013 - 05.01.2014
A space surrounds an object. The object is the core of the environment it occupies. In this core are dimensions of time and space. Considering that the relationships between the core and the space around it are abstract, and usually complex, what will become of the space if the core object is replaced by “authentic copies” of itself?
Tomas Martišauskis’s Creature looks at such relationships between sculptural and spatial matters. In this site-specific installation, in the place of the primary object are its three-dimensional likeness, drawings of its structural lines, a digitised animation of its behaviour, and its sound renditions.
Born in 1977, Tomas Martišauskis received his master’s degree in fine arts from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2006. He lives and works in Vilnius and has been exhibiting mainly in Lithuania.
The exhibition is a part of the Cultural Program of the Lithuanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and supported by The Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania and organized in cooperation with Galerija VARTAI in Vilnius.
Exposition photos: Pétur Thomsen
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Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen / K20, Dusseldorf, Germany
Zilvinas Kempinas: DARKROOM5.9.2013 – 26.1.2014
Installation view of the exhibition at K20, photo: Achim KukuliesEspecially for the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Kempinas has created a new installation that allows objects and structures – now bathed in red light – to appear as images in the darkroom of an old photographer. This association alludes to a condition that is suspended between dissolution in light and materialization at a secret location. The clarity of these forms, assembled from aluminum and video strips, also evoke experiences of irritation or confusion.
Kempinas – who lives in New York City, and was born in Plunge/Lithuania in 1969 – became familiar to an international public at the latest with the Venice Biennale of 2009. Currently, the Tinguely Museum in Basel is devoting a major survey exhibition to his work. With mastery, this artist unites principles of Constructivism, Minimalism, Op Art, and Kineticism. In 2007, these qualities made him the recipient of the Calder Prize. Kempinas has realized his most recent work, entitled DARKROOM, in situ in the Laboratory, the project room of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, as a confrontation with the proportions and other concrete characteristics of the space.
DARKROOM is on view simultaneously with the exhibition Alexander Calder: Avant- Garde in Motion (Sept 07, 2013 to Jan 12, 2014) at the K20 Grabbeplatz. Marion Ackermann, the Director of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, has juxtaposed Calder’s achievement – that of a classical modernist and co-discoverer of kinetic art – with that of a younger artist who in some of his works revisits kinetic aspects in his own way. In his new installation Kempinas invites the visitor to move between his constructions and ponder his process of perception – eventually making viewers reflect upon their relationship to the object.
©Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen
This exhibition is organised in collaboration with Galerija Vartai and is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
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Projektraum Viktor Bucher, Vienna
curated by_vienna 2011. Žilvinas Landzbergas "The Future is Now"Curator: Laura Rutkutė
12.05.2011 - 18.06.2011
Žilvinas Landzbergas, born in Kaunas (Lithuania) in 1979, divides his time between Vilnius and Amsterdam. Landzbergas is a dream weaver, known for placing the viewer in uncanny artificial surroundings equipped with cognitive triggers that seem at once familiar and distant. His artistic practice is concerned with story telling through the mediums of sculpture and three-dimensional installation, where the viewer becomes both a participant and a spectator - the narrator and character in the story. The Future is Now, his latest project, invites to revisit the future of our past in the disillusioned present tense. Loosely based on sci-fi literature and films, this installation is a made-up story comprised of animation and three-dimensional objects, that impels to reconcile with our status quo as the society of the future. A wooden panel curtain, picturing the landscape of the mountains divides the installation physically into two parts and symbolically in time. On one side the space is filled with misshaped objects of everyday life constituting the distorted story reminding of the never ending dream. The same imagery is used in a short ani-mation film forming links between the real, the imaginary and the past, displayed on the other side. The Future is Now, stereotyped verbalism, purposely chosen for the title as a posting of popular, iconic culture, the mainstream interpretation and sadly ridiculous vision of the future when looking back today.
Laura Rutkutė, curator and director of Vartai gallery in Vilnius, lives and works in Dresden, Germany. She was commissioner of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, featuring Zilvinas Kempinas installation Tube. She acts as chief curator of the ongoing international project ARTscape, launched by Vartai Gallery for the "European Capital of Culture 2009". Together with Raúl Zamudio she curated the exhibition City Without Walls at the 6th Liverpool Biennial in 2010.
curated by_vienna 2011 is a project that commissions co-operations betweem21 Vienna´s leading contemporary art galleries and internationally renowned curators. Under the title EAST by SOUTH WEST this year´s project takes as its starting point the importance and relevance of Vienna for Eastern and South-Eastern European contemporary art and artists.
Venue: Projektraum Viktor Bucher, Vienna
PATRONS
RENATA AND ROLANDAS VALIŪNAI
MAIN SUPPORTER
GALLERY SUPPORTERS
ROMAS KINKA VILMA DAGILIENĖ
CURRENT PROJECTS SUPPORTED BY
