Photo reportage from Eglė Ridikaitė's solo exhibition at the Exhibition Halls 'Titanikas'

December 30, 2016
Author Echo Gone Wrong

dsc_9436The exhibition You Came, You Saw, You Left: Cultural Floor is a modern painting exhibition, representing Eglė Ridikaitė’s love of the city of Vilnius and of its beauty. This is the largest exhibition to date of this celebrated Lithuanian painter, who has already held ten personal exhibitions and participated in more than eighty group exhibitions. In 2014, she was voted best artist at ARTVILNIUS’14 for her series of paintings Palikimas (Babutas skarialas) [Heritage (Grandma’s Scarfs)].

It took Ridikaitė four years of intense focus to create these 23 works of impressive scale. When wandering the city of Vilnius, through the stairwells of old buildings, the eyes of the artist were drawn to the undeservedly neglected stairwell décor – intricate ceramic floor patterns. She noticed the aesthetics and the beauty of the urban city of the late 19th and early 20th century, noticed something entirely overlooked and unappreciated by many of us. Eglė Ridikaitė has transferred the decorative floor arrangements into her creations, thus capturing and preserving the unnoticed. The paintings reveal the actual scale, the true outlines and colours of these floors. Ridikaitė’s artistic process raises these arrangements from the ground, and reinterprets them on gallery walls, in all their immensity, to tell the stories of former residents through the footprints left therein, and to evoke our own memories.

“By exhibiting her floors vertically, the artist disrupts the logics of ordinary perception. However, only in such a way is the beauty uplifted from dusty darkness into the proscenium of admiration, remembrance, and respect for the past”, writes the art critic Rasa Andriušytė-Žukienė.

Eglė Ridikaitė uses a complex, exceptional, and characteristic technique: after covering the canvas with pre-made handcrafted stencils, she does not paint, but sprays several layers of spray-paint, until the necessary textures and shades of colour are obtained. “By working with spray-paint, this modern painter does not touch the canvas with either a brush or her hands. The sprayed paint descends upon the surface of the canvas as tiny particles of dust. Hereby, the impression of the spontaneity and ephemerality of the image is amplified.” (Rasa Andriušytė-Žukienė)

This series encourages us to think about what we’ve inherited, about how we treat Vilnius’s creative, urban, cultural heritage. The paintings radiate nostalgic sentiment, memory, and a vision of Vilnius’s beauty, which does not lie behind the city in its entirety, but rather behind its details. The purpose of the exhibition You Came, You Saw, You Left: Cultural Floor is not only to express this beauty, raised up to eye level by the artist, but also to provide reflection on our heritage, on what our own lasting effect may be, and on what we take with us.

As we leave, we can only take away a nostalgic sentiment, a memory, or a vision of beauty.

Alongside these paintings, a short documentary by video artist Linas Augutis will be shown at the exhibition, introducing the creative processes of Eglė Ridikaitė.

Related events:

December 27 2016. “Nesumindyta istorija” (The Untrampled History). A guided tour by Donatas Jakubaitis of locations in Vilnius uncovered by Eglė Ridikaitė, and the opening of the second part of the exhibition in Artifex gallery (1 Gaono Street, Vilnius). The tour starts at 5pm, next to the building at 2A Užupio Street, and ends at Artifex gallery with the opening of the exhibition at 6:30pm.

January 7 2016. “Nesumindyta istorija” (The Untrampled History). A guided tour by Donatas Jakubaitis of locations in Vilnius uncovered by Eglė Ridikaitė. The tour starts at 1pm, next to the building at 2A Užupio Street (duration 1h 30min). The tour ends at Artifex gallery (1 Gaono Street, Vilnius).

Exhibition Curator: Vilma Mačianskaitė
Organiser: Contour Art Gallery, Vilnius
Vilnius Academy of Art, Titanikas Exhibition Halls, 2nd floor.
Opening hours:  Wed-Sat 12-6pm, Sun 12-4pm. Closed on Mon, Tue and public holidays.

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Photography: Butautas Barakauskas