'In Search Of Lost Home' by Simona Žilėnaitė at Meno Parkas Gallery in Dusseldorf

October 13, 2020
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Private view of the exhibition “In Search Of Lost Home” by Lithuanian painter Simona Žilėnaitė will be held on October 23rd (Friday) at 7pm at Meno Parkas Gallery in Dusseldorf (Dorotheenstrasse 22). Exhibition will be on view until November 14th.

“In search of lost home” solo show of a young generation painter Simona Žilėnaitė first appeared in summer of 2019 in south Italy in Pramantha arte gallery. The project’s artistic aim is about exploring psychological mechanisms of personal identity. The main used motives in the pictures are nature, human, totemic animal, shadows and memories or future visions.

“In search of lost home – says the artist – is a try/possibility of finding your home: maybe your inner home, maybe the very essential meaning of the things. To find your identity, the inner strength through painting. Sometimes through the shamanic animal, sometimes through finding beauty in the little casual things, who brings you in to the times of your childhood and to the state of the holiness of being. “In search of lost home” is a project about existential emptiness and a try to recover yourself, by looking back or creating future at this moment. It’s a try of coming back to where you even haven‘t been, to the created safe space to stay. So when I paint, I try to recreate (at the same time) create, that space, in which I want to be. It’s an exhibition about temporaryness, memories, intertwined time, under developmented time; present time, which is collected from memories and from created future motives. “In search of lost home” is a whole time in present. What I had, what I will have, but who already I am. It’s a confusion in this complicated and multilayered world; my attempt to find my place in it. Confusion and a discovery”.

“Simona Žilėnaitė’s painting – says Maria Rosaria Gallo, one of the curators of exhibition in Italy – presents a strong psychological intensity, full of narrative, humanness and mistery. Her pictures are characterized by a changing figuration that in the variety of subjects and the smudging of the surfaces, stands at the limit of a symbolic abstraction. Interiors with strong contrasts of light are populated with absences / presences left to the signs of time; plays of shadows, folds and reflections thicken the atmosphere of claustrophobic views; opacities and transparencies – played by light and worn curtains – separate the inside from the outside, almost waiting for an illuminating response. And also landscapes, objects, nature, animal and human‘s figures marked by the same strong contrasts“.

“Simona Žilėnaitė‘s exhibition – says Antonio Bruno Umberto Colosimo, the other curator of exhibition in Italy – at the very end can be understood as an investigation into the space; the space intended as a definition (crossing over and incessant redefinition) of physical, pictorial, gnoseological, psychological, existential boundaries. Simona Žilėnaitė’s painting becomes a metaphor for that search for mental references that determine the creation of the same personal, collective and human identity. A research that cannot ignore decay, loss, pain and inexorable reconstruction ”.

Exhibition is organized by Meno Parkas Gallery / Exhibition partner “Gleixnerart”

Exhibition is part of gallery’s project “The Young. Green Consciousness”. Project is partly financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.