NADA New York 2023: VARTAI with VITA ZAMAN & AIDAS BAREIKIS

We are happy to announce that we are participating in the Contemporary Art Fair NADA New York 2023, presenting the latest works of Vita Zaman and Aidas Bareikis, which have never been exhibited together before.

The two artists are unified by a slow process that enables both creatives to introspectively examine their relationship with their environment and the socio-cultural factors that have determined or will determine their inner development. One could say that the choice of this process is a kind of healing with confrontation: facing the real or the unreal, the historical or the fictional, the tangible or the ephemeral modes of oneself engulfed in everyday life. 

To achieve such ‘enlightenment’ Zaman and Bareikis employ handcrafting and DYI practices:

Vita Zaman mixes painting with embroidery to encode her own biography, in which the dynamic experience in the art markets of London and Los Angeles was replaced by a slow life in Kaunas. Rediscovery of this domestic craft, as a form of meditation, enables Zaman to work with the motifs that come from the depths of the soul, where traumas, fears, dreams and wishes would appear on the canvas with the help of a painfully painstaking technique; transferring (or even exposing) the interiority into the plane of the material. By taking the ‘ready-made’ visuals, subconsciously taken as a stack of unexpected scenarios and images, Zaman alters them into primitive, even clichéd motifs to function like the heroes of a subconsciously drawn cartoon, where complex experiences can be translated. 

In parallel, Bareikis’ work involves a critique of social, cultural, and political environments. The chaotic constructs made of urban readymade installations and a series of automatic paintings come across as nothing short of the manifestations of entropy itself. Aidas Bareikis’ sculptures are propped up by found furniture, wood, or aluminium, and exposed to forces like time, gravity, or various corrosive substances. Rendered in deep colours each work operates like a junkyard relic: a curious portal into another era slowly merging with the local flora. It’s here where Bareikis navigates, somewhere between the scientific method and pure psychic automatism, equally covering his tracks in the role of wandering scientist and mad poet.

ADDRESS

548 West at 548 West 22nd St, New York, NY 10011

The project is supported by: Lithuanian Council for Culture

Gallery patrons: Renata and Rolandas Valiūnai

 Gallery supporters: Vilnius City Municipality, Lietuvos Rytas, Vilma Dagilienė, Roma Puišienė, Rasa Juodviršienė, Romas Kinka, Ekskomisarų biuras, MailerLite, Plieno Spektras