The art project “Millennium“ symbolically refers to Lithuania’s thousand year anniversary and presents the artworks of Lithuanian artists: Inga Likšaitė, Laura Keblytė, Aura Draugelė, Agnė Jonkutė, Irma Leščinskaitė, Rasma Noreikytė, Žygimantas Augustinas and Tadas Vosylius in Denmark. The authors intriguingly emphasize constituent parts of “art culture”, i.e. form and colour, texture and facture, materiality and time dimension, semantics, its codes and canons. Both virtuosity, mastery of technique and intrigue of contents are given equal importance in their artworks. The authors pay much attention to remakes of the form or the idea of artwork, paraphrasing it by means of different medias or just replicating the motives of light, colour abstractions or bodily physiology. Optical effects, reflections of public conscience characteristic for the concepts of contemporary art, even stylisation of renaissance ideas and gorgeous baroque vibrancy intertwine in these artworks. The exhibition presents modern textile and painting, kinetic installations, objects and video projections. „Millennium“ – is thousands of variations ranging from elementary plastic effects to visualisation of creative process.

Paintings by Agnė Jonkutė show minimalism in colours, transformed surfaces, touched by light.  Daring and rejecting the classical canons of art, the artist’s artworks are focused on self-reflection, analysis of a person and details of everyday-life. Canvases turn into peculiar screens for stories of spontaneous creative impulses, where the light creates and destroys the
reality, reveals unexpected associations and transforms the existence.

Giving respect to mass production (textile in this case), subjectivity  and combination of styles, trivial round and pastiche, Aura Draugelė begins to comment on the properties of mass production, giving a distinctive „merchant appearance“. Liberated from the daily environment the textile becomes inseparable from the content of a picture and it extends a visual field of creation.

Manipulating with contrasts of substance and relativity of time, Tadas Vosylius creates objects,
unclassifiable neither to junk nor to kinetic art. His artworks need to be observed, for they affect
not even viewer’s physical senses, but metaphysical feelings too. A usual sculpture turns into a fourdimensional object, i.e. illusion, or the provocation for an observer. The author’s artworks rumble, moan, print invoices and faxes, respond to a touch. His objects Corpses seem to be snatched from the very last minutes of life inertia. Thus the artist presents us the simulacrum of post move and post rhetoric, as a thin red line between the canons of traditional sculpture and contemporary aesthetics.

Laura’s Keblytė’s installation „Neither fuzz, nor plumage“ was inspired by ecologic catastrophe - pandemic flu. This has looked to her like diagnosis of the modern world society. Chicken is polysemantic and associative object. “By choosing it I was trying to think ironically relating to moral changes of the world”, - said Laura.

Painter Žygimantas Augustinas represents contemporary Lithuanian painting. By combining Baroque stylistics and modern art concepts, the artist couples a person with his/her subcultural clone. Pseudo-environment and encyclopaedic reality, pseudo-self and pseudo-symbol. Neorealism by Ž. Augustinas is playfully existential and intrusively romantic.

Regarding lithuanian philosopher Vytautas Radžvilas, Irma Leščinskaitė belongs to the younger  generation of Lithuanian painters and she undoubtedly is one of the most original of it’s representatives. Her painting is a brilliant combination of professional mastership and metaphysical striving. The painter is able to use in a masterly fashion all means of expression of the pictorial art, the most important to her being color. Her paintings manifest many features of postmodern art: irony and self-irony, free and elegant citing-play with the forms of past culture, especially those of the baroque pictorial art. 

Inga Likšaitė

Mainly in my art activity I am working using textiles as a medium. Especially it is a stitch (hand made, machine sewed, digital machine embroidery). It inspires me to look at it and treat the stitch in more various concepts. The idea for this video I've got under a process of making textiles series for the installation inspired and dedicated to Wong Kar Wai's film “In the mood for love” / “Fa yeung nin wa”. I recovered the favorite scenes out of the movie by stitching them with sewing machine. The intention was to find minimal way of reflecting main characters and emotion got from the film and to make them move and talk again using additional art forms.

Curators of the project: Ignas Kazakevičius and Bronė Neverdauskienė.

Organizers: Klaipėda culture communication center „Kultūrpolis“, Liana Ruokyte-Jonsson
Cultural Attaché of Lithuania to Denmark, Iceland and Norway, gallery “Kunstpakhuset”.

Sponsors: Ministry of Culture of Republic of Lithuania, Culture support fund.

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