(AV17) gallery at the art fair ArtVerona

(AV17) gallery participated at the international art fair ArtVerona, where the main focus was dedicated to Lithuanian art scene. (AV17) gallery presented Lithuanian sculptors Rimantas Milkintas, Rafal Piesliak, Nerijus Erminas and Tauras Kensminas.

Rimantas Milkintas is a sculptor and installation artist whose work is distinguished by a combination of characteristic minimalist aesthetics and kinetic plasticity. Due to focus on the significant form of a work of art and its material properties, creations of the artist are often compared to those of Lithuanian and foreign classics of modernism. However, in continuing the tradition of modern sculpture, especially minimalist aesthetics, Milkintas also successfully develops strategies of postmodern art and the language of conceptualism. Instead of classic materials, the artist opts for veneer, metal and industrial beams, which, in his opinion, reflect our times best. At the art fair the artist presents to visitors works made of industrial beams. The use of industrial beams conveys the multilayer experience, which referees to the past – historical context of the material, and the nowadays – industrial beam rebuilt, by using it in the artwork and provide with emotional and individual experience.

The work of R. Piesliak can be divided into periods, during which the artist dedicates all of his creative energy to the development of a specific theme. As a result of these theme-based cycles, the artworks created by the sculptor become a kind of each other’s continuation and are closely interconnected by conceptual links. One of the most important themes of the work of Piesliak, which has been an object of his extensive exploration, is the connection of a person’s mental and emotional state with the surrounding environment. At the ‘ArtVerona’ artist exhibits a series of transformed porcelain utensils from different period and cultural context, which is being questioned on the basis of novelty, aesthetics, tradition and human experience. Based on the Japanese traditional reparation technique of broken ceramics called ‘Kintsugi’, when the broken utensils are being raised for the new life, the artist changes the ‘Kintsugi’ practical result – he creates an artwork from utensils, which lost their primary function and provide aesthetic pleasure.

Nerijus Erminas presented his new artwork at art fair ‘ArtVerona’ inspired by Stanisław Lem book Solaris and a film by Andrei Tarkovsky. By using marble as the mostly widespread in classical sculpture the artist pictures seaweed plant forms. He makes them ‘thing like’ and awards with important elements as to the laboratory samples. The seaweeds become metaphoric on the basis of world’s ignorance and subjectivity that tend to accompany us. His works are characterized by sensitive transformation of reality into surreal and subconscious experiences. The narrative installations created by the artist transform easily recognizable elements of human life and everyday situations turning them in an unusual direction distant from the reality, while the viewer is caught in a never-ending play of meanings. Stories behind the work of Erminas take shape in the process of observing and analyzing everyday rituals, interpreting both cultural and political context, history, religion, and expressing personal as well as collective experience.

The young-generation Lithuanian sculptor and installation artist. For T. Kensminas, sculpture is a non-verbal way of telling a complex, multi-layered story. The thematic content for the works is created in an attempt to materialize difficult to describe situations, internal experiences, and the effects of different social and cultural contexts. The author continues his long-lived series of ‘Future fossils’ at the art fair and presents sculpture objects of science fiction topics. The artwork is related to the global control mechanisms in the environment, starting from the control of the movement in the spaces to the availability of information and knowledge control mechanisms. The author questions these topics in modern global context range, where the security becomes more and more relevant, and his work become the symbol of safety and eye-tracking.

The project was partially supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and The Lithuanian Culture Institute.