Antanas Gudaitis. Compositions
15 May – 5 October 2025
I believe that the greatest value that a person can achieve – both in living and in making art – is moral purity. Truthfulness – both for oneself and others. For me, this is the main thing. Both in art and life.
Antanas Gudaitis
This exhibition is important for several reasons: it is a presentation and an invitation to cooperate with the Antanas Gudaitis Foundation, which takes care of the artist’s creative legacy and its dissemination. It is also special because no major exhibition of the artist has been held for at least several decades. The latest retrospective exhibition dedicated to the centenary of the artist’s birth, „Liberation“ (Išsilaisvinimas), was held at the Lithuanian Art Museum twenty-one year ago (curated by Jolita Mulevičiūtė and Lolita Jablonskienė).
The new exhibition „Compositions“ reveals the most vibrant creative period of Antanas Gudaitis, highly appreciated by himself, which began around 1959 and lasted until he died in 1989.
Antanas Gudaitis is a 20th-century Lithuanian artist with a complicated destiny, who experienced the full burden of historical cataclysms and trials that the Lithuanian nation faced. He was born in 1904, when Lithuania was still part of the Tsarist Russian Empire, and lived through two world wars, a short period of the independent Republic of Lithuania, German and Soviet occupations, and oppression. He did not live to see the restoration of Lithuanian statehood.
From 1929 to 1935, Gudaitis studied in Paris, where his artistic worldview, based on modernist principles, was formed. He drew the main impulses for his creative work from his own experiences, was open to various cultural, political, and life events, and was always changing. Returning from Paris to Kaunas in 1932, he and his friends started to implement the idea of an exhibition of Lithuanian modern art. The exhibition was accompanied by the publication „Ars“, in which the introduction was later called the first Lithuanian fine art manifesto. Throughout his creative life, Gudaitis maintained his creative principles and values, and it was from these principles that he set out to revive Lithuanian art in the 1930s.
One of the aims of the exhibition is to show the artist’s path of creative thinking and exploration. From the initial drawings, sketches, and painterly etudes to the one or more versions of the work that satisfied him, revealing the importance of each stage. What interests the artist is not the final, perfected result of his search, but the variety of possible solutions, reflections on a certain painting theme. During the creative process, Gudaitis combined his free associative flow of thought, spontaneity and vitality with meticulous preparatory work and thoughtful, Gudaitis combined his free associative flow of thought, spontaneity and vitality with meticulous preparatory work and thoughtful composition. The artist’s works have often been criticised as „formalistic“, not only because it is difficult to „read into“ people, their relationships, their states, but also because of the hasty, expressive, sketchy painting. The figurative side of painting was particularly important to Gudaitis, while the content and the idea are revealed and strengthened, gaining significance in the cultural, political, and historical context, precisely through the artist’s choice of figurativity. The impact of Gudaitis’ works is made up of their totality – colour, linear, and textural matter. This whole is indivisible; the quality of colour cannot be separated from line and stroke. The artist’s work is characterised by the absence of an overt plot narrative, and the true intentions of the artist are often concealed by the titles of the artworks.
The exhibition features Algimantas Kunčius’ photography and archival 16 mm film footage, which captures not only Antanas Gudaitis himself, but also his surroundings – his home, his workshop, the Vilnius Academy of Arts, the Vilnius artists’ workshops, the cultural environment of the time, and his relatives and best friends.
Curator Algė Gudaitytė
Coordinators: Skaistė Marčienė, Aurelija Malinauskaitė
Architect Ieva Cicėnaitė
Designer Rusnė Šimulynaitė
Photography and cinema footage: Algimantas Kunčius
Editing: Ignas Urbonas
- Purchase an e-ticket for this exhibition
- Book a guided tour of this exhibition by phone +370 46 410 421, email domsaicio.edukacija@lndm.lt
- Plan your visit to the Pranas Domšaitis Gallery
33 Liepu st, LT-92145, Klaipėda, Lithuania
+370 46 410 412
domsaicio.galerija@lndm.lt
