KONSTANTINAS BOGDANAS: 9/4
Curator Inesa Pavlovskaitė
As some of the works are only displayed for a couple of hours per day, visitors wishing to gain the full picture are encouraged to visit the gallery during the times indicated: Tuesday to Friday at 5 to 7 pm, and Saturday at 1 to 3 pm.
The gallery is open Tuesday to Friday at 12 to 7 pm, and Saturday at 12 to 4 pm.
The title of Konstantinas Bogdanas Jr.'s solo show signifies only what it literally contains (or will if the visitor arrives at recommended hours) – nine works inside four halls in the Galerija VARTAI. Each hall contains 0.75 to 3.75 artworks, most created specifically for the show.
The work of Konstantinas Bogdanas Jr. is marked by conceptuality and sparseness of material expression, embodied by the absence of visual stimuli and minimalistic solutions in the installation. The ideological axis of Bogdanas Jr.'s work and the motives of his specific expression are quite accurately defined by the artistic strategy formulated by Douglas Huebler, a representative of classic conceptualism: the world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.
The majority of the artist's works is of textual nature, taking on the form of written and spoken language. The only painting displayed in the show is thoroughly purged of any decorative or metaphorical elements, becoming rather a container of facts – a statistic component inscribed at a specific moment in time. The artist also applies a reverse method, simplifying an information surplus to an abstract graphic figure which acquires a new significance within the exhibition. In the traditional narrative of modern art history, dematerialisation of artwork is interpreted as a creative stance in opposition to the art market, institutional politics and production surplus. Institutional critique appears in Bogdanas Jr.'s work as a diagnosis of persisting problems in the local art world, playfully flirting with them by, for example, offering a collector or museum a limited-time possession of all artworks that are produced by the artist after signing a contract – or as a more personal critique of the relationship between creator and reality in the contemporary world, visualised in sport terms and mechanisms.
Once dematerialised, materialism returns to the show in a different, but very salient form: the artist records the web of material processes taking place in reality by exposing the residue of one of these processes – the mud tracked by the shoes of visitors in a previous exhibition. The gallery as a social, political and economic structure requires the visitor as a guarantee of its continued existence, even as he brings dirt inside.
The works of Bogdanas Jr. are actors in the present tense. Reflection of the present manifests not just in creating interactive situations within the show – from an artwork that not all will be able to see, to an excursion to the dark, sometimes capricious and unpredictable side of artistic creation, guided by an intermediary – but also in the most general goal of his art: discussing where and how the creator, the artwork, the spectator and the art institution exist and what they perform, either individually or combined in multifarious structures.
