Summer-season routes at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art: from long romanticism to the breaking of social norms
The Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA) meets this summer by inviting its visitors to nine new exhibitions. The exhibitions opening at different venues of the museum are to cover a broad variety and individual aspects of Lithuanian culture – from reflections of the romantic period and explorations of cultural memories to contemporary photography, interdisciplinary art and documentary audio tracks.
According to the LNMA Director General Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, this summer season at the LNMA stands out through its diversity, offering opportunities to its visitors to discover things of personal interest and to enjoy art at a more relaxed summertime pace.
“This summer the LNMA invites to experience art not only as a source of aesthetic satisfaction, but also as a way to travel across periods of time and cultures, collective memory and personal reflections. It is an opportunity to stop, to delve into deeper questions, or simply to discover something new. I believe that our visitors, both in Vilnius, and the holidaymakers in coastal Lithuania, will be surprised at what our venues have to offer,” Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA, says.
The summer season starts in coastal Lithuania
The summer season starts at Pamario Gallery in Juodkrantė with the opening, on 13 June, of two new exhibitions: The Multilayered World of Being by the graphic art master Šarūnas Leonavičius’s and an audiovisual narrative Preila Project by Ignė Narbutaitė and Ieva Kotryna Ski.
Šarūnas Leonavičius’s subtle and lush in detail creative world will make the viewers wonder at his rich visual narratives that stretch between history, mythology, religion, literature and surrealist imagination. On display are the artist’s prints from the series dedicated to the works by Gintaras Beresnevičius, Lietuvių religija ir mitologija (Lithuanian Religion and Mythology) and to the poem Metai (The Year) by Kristijonas Donelaitis, a wide range of etchings and drawings explore a variety of religious, poetic and mythological themes.
The video-installation Preila Project by two young-generation artists Ignė Narbutaitė and Ieva Kotryna Ski is a melancholic, occasionally ironic voyage across personal and collective memory. The exhibition weaves together contrasting narratives. On the one hand, the images of present-day-resort life tell the story of calmness, boredom and withdrawal to the periphery, while the other thread of the visual narrative relocates the viewer to the highly publicized year 1998 and the frenzy of the search for the Amber Room.
The graphicalities of Rimtautas Vincentas Gibavičius at the National Gallery of Art
Friday, 20 June the National Gallery of Art (NGA) opens a retrospective Rimtautas Vincentas Gibavičius (1935–1993): The Count of Countless Talents dedicated to one of the foremost 2nd half of the 20th century Lithuanian graphic artists referred to, by his friends and colleagues simply as “Count” (here, a phonetic pun worked as in Lithuanian “count” also means an earl). The exhibition celebrating the artist’s 90th birth anniversary, captures the scale of his multifaceted art, from linocuts and bookplates, to stage designs, projects of monumental art, posters and book illustrations.
Gibavičius’s world is the realm of The Count of Countless Talents, the ground where visual precision and cultural erudition come together. His work is a profound reflection on the world, art and man, his exquisitely elaborate forms are vehicles for his ideas.
Starting 18 July, visitors to the NGA will also see an exhibition of new acquisitions. It is a unique opportunity to peak at the art pieces accumulated and selected by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art. These are works of contemporary and modern Lithuanian art that reflect the formation principles of the LNMA collection, the artistic trends and acquisition strategies. Visitors are invited to see the artwork that have only recently become part of the collection – paintings, graphic art, photography and applied artefacts. The exhibition is a mirror to the vibrant and constantly changing identity of the museum.
The routes of romanticism and a retrospective provocation at Vilnius venues of the LNMA
The exhibition The Romantic Ages, opening at Vilnius Picture Gallery on 1 July, will challenge its visitors by offering a profound and more complex perspective on the epoch of romanticism, highly consequential to the Lithuanian culture, history and the national self-image. The Romantic Ages will embrace the so-called long period of romanticism – both, the traditionally perceived trend of early-19th-century-literature and art, and the late, 19th – early 20th-century neo-romanticism which revived the ideas of romanticism and was so closely linked to the national movements in Lithuania as to be perceived as a “national romanticism”.
Paintings, sculpture pieces, applied art artefacts, period works of literature, musical instruments and fashion exhibits, rarely appearing at fine art events, will invite the public to perceive the romanticisms as a cultural construct, which melds together different forms of art, politics and social shifts into a complex, multifaceted, and not always so “romantic” narrative as happens to be in the case of Lithuania.
The Radvila Palace Museum of Art offers four new events that are worth visiting. On 11 July, the museum will open an interdisciplinary exhibition Changing, It Rests by Akvilė Anglickaitė. The exhibition will propose a quiet conversation with nature through photography, video and drawings. The analogue photography technique used by the artist takes back to pre-digital times of the aesthetics of light and chemical processes, thus offering an opportunity to slow down for a meditative contemplation of nature and to ponder on what it is being part of nature in the contemporary culture of technology and speed.
On 24 July, the Radvila Palace Museum of Art opens a retrospective of contemporary artist Evaldas Jansas, the Extrapolation. The display will span the artist’s career of over three decades, featuring performances, video, installations, objects, paintings – the entirety of art that cannot be ignored. Jansas’s art is there not only for seeing, it invites confrontation. The Extrapolation promises to be not only an existential portrait of the artist himself, but a mirror of the cultural history of independent Lithuania, bringing to the foreground social taboos, the process of pushing the boundaries of aesthetic norms and contemporary public reflections.
This summer the Radvila Palace Museum of Art, in partnership with Vilnius Academy of Arts and “Nepatogus kinas”, the organisers of the documentary film festival “Inconvenient Films”, will host two more events. Until 22 June, visitors can see Travel Agency, an interdisciplinary Master’s degree-graduation project by Roma Salė, graduating from Vilnius Academy of Arts. From 12 through 20 June, the museum will host an audio-documentary festival “Banguoja”, such only event in the Baltic countries. Museum visitors will have an opportunity to listen to thoroughly selected audio pieces and discuss, with the creators of these works, the themes of human rights, social problems, war and body.
Opportunities to explore the exhibitions that are already on
Summer time public is also invited to see the recently opened exhibitions. Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art in Vilnius hosts the project In Honour of a Reborn Pain by the contemporary French artist Tania Mouraud. The exhibition dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust will be on until 9 November. The Museum of Applied Arts and Design invites to see the exhibition Stasys Ušinskas: the Iceberg of Lithuanian Modernism, which will run until 14 September. The Amber Museum in Palanga hosts an exhibition of Japanese decorative art, Samurai Treasures: Artistic Elements of Japanese Swords and Miniature Sculpture from the collection of Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts. It will be on display until 15 September. The Stuff by Post Ars group at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art will run until 29 June. The photography exhibition Pleasure by Janina Sabaliauskaitė and 21st-century-female artists’ exhibition Everything You Are Not Supposed to Do are open until 28 September.
More information on all exhibitions and other events at the LNMA is available on the LNMA website and on FB.
