Kęstutis Kuizinas, director and founder of the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius (CAC), will deliver a lecture on the current state of Lithuanian contemporary art. The lecture will take place the day before the opening of Extension.LT: Parallel Narratives (Triumph Gallery, February 21–March 17, 2019), a group show that will feature more than ten artists from Lithuania.
After World War II, Kaunas gave way to Vilnius as the national center of cultural activity. In the 1950s and 1960s, Lithuania saw the emergence of art in forms that are now conventionally termed contemporary. Its history is complex and contentious. A golden age may be identified, when art flourished; a period of post-war stagnation followed marked with conceptualization of the Soviet reality. Many artists had to leave the country. Those who stayed were faced with serious economic struggle. Despite this, the last decade of the twentieth century, after the restoration of Independence, brought about a radical change of artistic values and aesthetic criteria in Lithuanian art. The artists were trying to go against the grain and re-evaluate the modern world. The booming development of art in the country and its international integration was also influenced by opening of the Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius in 1992.
The lecture will provide an overview of projects by the most prominent Lithuanian artists who have had exhibitions at the Center and beyond in the last decade. The Center is the largest institution of its kind in the Baltic region and has the greatest impact among similar institutions in the former Soviet republics. Among its key projects is the Baltic Triennial that aims to bring together contemporary artists from the Baltic states.
The lecture will have a special focus on projects by local artists: Žilvinas Landzbergas, Deimantas Narkevičius, Emilija Škarnulytė, Robertas Narkus, Indrė Šerpytytė and others. Kęstutis Kuizinas will use these works as examples to showcase major themes that are explored in contemporary Lithuanian art.
The talk is part of the program for the upcoming show EXTENSION.LT: Parallel Narratives, which will take place from February 21 to March 13, 2019, at Triumph Gallery and feature works by more than ten contemporary artists from Lithuania.
This event has been realized with the support of The Lithuanian Institute of Culture and the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in the Russian Federation.
