Šarūnas Sauka, Self-Portrait No 4, 1985, Oil on canvas, 110×110, Property of the artist
On 15th of January, a major retrospective of works by famous and highly original Lithuanian painter Šarūnas Sauka will be opened at the National Gallery of Art, Vilnius.
“We are glad to be able to put over a hundred of Sauka’s works on show, including his huge populated canvases,” says Lolita Jablonskienė, the chief curator at the National Gallery of Art. “Sauka is an outstanding artist, who is still barely known in Western Europe, and this exhibition, which has been long awaited by the Lithuanian public, is a rare opportunity to see a large collection of his work.”
Šarūnas Sauka (b. 1958) appeared on the art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when artistic freedom in Lithuania was still very limited by Soviet censorship. A rebel against all norms that are founded on oppression or superstition, he has always set out to challenge whatever society or the system deemed to be “inappropriate” or “indecent”. In 1989, at the age of only 31, his talents were recognised in the first award of the Lithuanian National Art and Culture Prize (the country’s most prestigious national award for art).
His style of painting is unique, and eminently recognisable in both the Lithuanian art world and abroad. His paintings could best be compared with the work of the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. The grounds for making such a parallel lie in the disturbing, complex, and highly unusual apocalyptic visions which are characteristic of both Bosch and Sauka, as well as in the exceptional attention paid to detail by both painters. Due to his extreme care, it takes Sauka months, and even years, to finish his largest paintings.
Sauka creates an inexplicably unrealistic world from stunningly lifelike details. His multilayered narratives contain references to mythology, literature, film and the history of art. They stretch the boundary between the sacred and the profane, and create visual paradoxes that are both intellectually challenging and very funny. One of the most distinctive characteristics in his paintings is his own face, which is repeated regularly throughout his creative work.
“This face is a mask worn by the most diverse characters, ranging from a female nude to Jesus Christ,” says Monika Saukaitė, the curator of the exhibition. “These characters with the same face connect all the paintings in a coherent whole, in a weird and integrated world based on its own peculiar logic.”
The exhibition “The Man with Sauka’s Face” will be on show at the National Gallery of Art until 6 March 2016.
Curator Monika Saukaitė
Architect Justinas Dūdėnas
