The AV17 gallery showcases educational videos about contemporary Lithuanian sculpture and sculptors, with the focus on presenting material on sculptures produced by contemporary means. In order to spread information and an understanding of this art form, a video series will reflect the main principles of contemporary sculpture, such as the creative process, context behind it and the materials used in the process.
The ongoing project will present well-known and younger-generation sculptors: Nerijus and Andrius Erminas, Rimantas Milkintas, Rafal Piesliak, Tauras Kensminas, Jonas Aničas, and others. Focusing on different artists from different generations, the videos will reveal their views on sculpture, what is most important to them, and shared similarities and differences. New tendencies in the use of materials, research into new sculptural forms, and various contemporary issues, will also be narrated by the artists and depicted in these videos.
Nerijus Erminas is one of the best-known Lithuanian creators of conceptual sculptures, whose works are characterised by sensitive transformations of reality into surreal and subconscious experience. His narrative installations depict details of human life, and transform everyday situations by seeing them from unusual, surreal angles, thereby involving the observer in a never-ending game of meanings. Erminas develops his ideas not only by observing and examining everyday rituals, but also by interpreting cultural and political contexts, historical developments, and religion, and by conveying both his personal and collective experiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpBOSiPZEaU
Andrius Erminas is a conceptual artist who is well known for his sensitive and associative sculptural objects and installations. Some of the most important creative principles he employs are the use of references, the construction of an imaginative narrative, and the transformation of old and easily recognisable everyday objects and materials into new symbolic sculptures. Through the use of unexpected interconnections, Erminas changes both the meaning and the inner characteristics of objects, turning them into symbols filled with tension, philosophical ideas, and personal experiences.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eXmiKcPtXA
Rimantas Milkintas is a sculptor and installation artist, whose work is distinguished by a combination of characteristic minimalist aesthetics and kinetic plasticity. Due to his focus on the main form of a work of art and its material properties, his works are often compared to 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOQBLXu77qo
Rafal Piesliak is a sculptor who creates spatial installations and objects using various sources of light. His works can be divided into periods, during which he devotes all his creative energy to the development of a specific theme. As a result of these theme-based cycles, his works become a kind of continuation of each other, and are closely interconnected by conceptual links. One of the most important themes in his work, which has been the object of extensive explorations for him, is the connection between the surrounding environment and a person’s mental and emotional state.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zc1jl-LUm8&t=22s [1]
Tauras Kensminas is a younger-generation sculptor and installation artist. For him, sculpture is a non-verbal way of telling a complex, multi-layered story. The thematic content of the work is created in an attempt to materialise difficult-to-describe situations, internal experiences, and the effects of different social and cultural contexts. Kensminas’ installations, pieced together like a puzzle from individual elements, stimulate the imagination, without imposing a single correct interpretation of the work of art.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u-eQOuSkPQ [2]
The project is partially funded by The Lithuanian Council for Culture.