'link' by Eglė Ridikaitė

19 June – 2 October 2021

The exhibition ‘link’ presents works by Eglė Ridikaitė created throughout the period of 2016–2021, linked by the theme of the journey: towards (link) a way out, towards (link) enlightenment. For the artist, fragments of forgotten beauty serve as references to a bond of love, traces of faith which inspire her to go forward. It can be a person, a holy site or simply a cherished place in Vilnius. Eglė has been given a temporary studio in a kindergarten built during the Soviet period, which will soon be destroyed. The archaeologists excavating the site have uncovered the remains of the Great Synagogue of Vilnius. While nobody will repair the historical injustice for the dead, Eglė leads the living towards (link) reconciliation and closure by linking what is underground with what is overground via her paintings. Last summer, she entered a synagogue in Gėlių Street to see the restoration in progress and noticed an ornament on the floor. She washed off the construction dust, transferred the pattern onto a plastic sheet, and now, during the exhibition, she is ‘highlighting’ the image with aerosol paint.

 

Eglė Ridikaitė stands out for her monumental poetics of the everyday. By transferring found objects onto her canvases she revives shared experiences. For her series of 18 pieces, Heritage (Grandma’s Scarves), she won the Best Artist Award at the Art Vilnius fair in 2014. In 2018, for her series of 25 paintings, Cultured Floors, she was awarded the Government Prize for Culture and Arts. In 2020, Eglė became the laureate of the National Culture and Art Prize for ‘the actualisation of cultural heritage in contemporary painting’. Eglė keeps searching for what is invisible to others: the columns of the destroyed synagogue as buried moons, the cramped room of a dying woman, the ‘forest’ of paving tiles arranged in a herringbone pattern. This is an unending journey towards (link) the lucidity of painting.

 

 

 

Curators: Laima Kreivytė, Agnė Narušytė

 

Designer Agnė Dautartaitė-Krutulė

 

Architect Justinas Dudėnas

 

Sponsors: Clear Channel, Daiva Bakė

 

Project is funded by

 

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