The Rooster Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition ‘Hush-hush Island’ by Aukse Miliukaite. Lithuanian painter of the young generation will present her latest work and artistic research. The exhibition will be held June 1–15 at Pakrantė, The Centre for Creative Industries (Vaidilutės str. 79, 10100 Vilnius, Lithuania). Exhibition opening Friday 1 June at 6.30 pm.
The source of artistic inspirations for the painter is culture and its history, and her creative method is based on the appropriation, reproduction and postproduction of images. Her paintings, which the artist describes as narratives reminiscent of the dreams of an individual spoiled by culture, are constructed by combining historical art, contemporary art quotes, elements of pop culture and details of her own autobiography. She replicates, crops and transforms the borrowed elements of paintings, arranges them into new semantic combinations and tells new stories of her own.
In her newest works Miliukaitė develops her personal mythology of painting as an island. Hush-hush Island is an idyllic place created from fragments of various works of art, cinematography, literature and music, and inhabited by well-familiar and anonymous characters. It becomes a kind of shelter for the artist, where she transports herself while painting. This island does not have geographical coordinates, it cannot be defined by physical parameters and manifests itself in various shapes: as an exotic island, an oasis (or merely its mirage), or as a nostalgic resort. Her vision combines the ideas of the island of Utopia described by Thomas More and the ocean that covers the planet in Stanisław Lem’s ‘Solaris’, producing and reproducing images. Like an art tourist hungry for new visual experiences and strangest stories, and never having enough of them, the artist takes herself on a creative field trip to explore the island. She takes the viewers with her and helps them create their own idyll of a hush-hush island. Or leads them astray in this enthralling and colourful labyrinth of images.
AUKSĖ MILIUKAITĖ (b. 1990) studied at the University of the Arts in London and in 2017 graduated from her painting studies (MA) at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She has held several solo shows and is an active participant of group exhibitions, artistic projects, workshops and plain-air sessions. She was a finalist of Young Painter‘s Prize competition (2016, 2017) and received honourable mention (2017). Her paintings have become part of the collections of Lewben Art Foundation and Mo Museum (Modern Art Centre) in Vilnius.
Curators / Kuratorės: Juste Auguste, Jurgita Juospaityte Bitiniene
Design / Dizainas: Marek Voida
Aukse Miliukaite received the individual grant from Lietuvos kultūros taryba