Jurga Barilaitė: Show It

April 18, 6 p. m., VARTAI gallery opens the show Show It from the interdisciplinary artist Jurga Barilaitė.

Show It is the final stage of the project Unfinished Works which began in 2009. The project refers to the state of uncertainty that has befallen the artists of the middle generation and which stems from their inability to enter the European art market despite being prominent players in the Lithuanian field of art. This uncertainty forces the artists to abandon the media that helped them win their fame and to revert from video art, installations and interdisciplinary projects to painting and drawing. On the other hand, practical circumstances prevent them from finishing their ideas and force them into artistic impasse.

Jurga Barilaitė often becomes the subject of her own works – a certain character embodying a female artist. In the fusion of the woman and the artist of her earlier works, emphasis was put on the component of the woman, which was revealed through the problems of exaltation, sexuality and maternity, and the pointing to the masculine nature in the woman. The later stage highlights the artist and the direct connection of creativity with the possibility and impossibility of creativity. However, as one of the constituents becomes more important, the other does not disappear, because the two are naturally and inseparably connected.

Show It consists of four parts: The Archive of Unfinished Works, What I Would Do, If I Did, Who Hasn’t Painted, Will / The Beginning of a Collection and Escape. The project/state began with What I Would Do, If I Did where painting – which was employed in the beginning of the artist’s career – became a part of a video work. Who Hasn’t Painted, Will / The Beginning of a Collection consists of huge abstract canvases that were created when a sufficiently big space became available in the studio in Fluxus Ministry. The title refers to the theory of a Lithuanian old generation painter that none of the artists can escape the stage of painting at some point of his or her career. Escape is made up of drawing therapy sessions, while The Archive of Unfinished Works is a collection of unfinished video works that were conceived and begun in 2005 when the artist acquired a video camera, but were not completed due to various adverse circumstances. The preview of this work – canvases with the titles and descriptions of the video works – were on display in March in the show Post-idea in the exhibition halls Titanikas of Vilnius Academy of Arts. The excerpts of unfinished video works are combined through the images from the former building of Fluxus Ministry which here becomes the metaphor of exploited, obsolete and desolate world of art.

Patron: Vilnius City Municipality

Sponsors of the gallery:  Bosca, Lietuvos rytas, Tark Grunte Sutkiene, Infoterminalas, JCDecaux Bioderma, UAB Draugų s