A horizon with thousands of white flat-steel elements—2 mm to 110 mm thick and 6 cm to 240 cm tall, appearing in numerous sizes and variations, all complete with anonymous faces—stretches across the one-thousand-square-metre Great Hall of the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius. Standing, seated or kneeling, bent or twisted, on their own or with company, or in monumental stacks of stiff acrobats, the steel elements become the architecture themselves, thus revealing the building’s genesis in 1968. The mass of the elements’ whiteness strips the CAC’s supposedly white hall of its assumed role as a white cube. In the presence of this multitude of anonymous, perfectly uniform elements, the vast, seemingly neutral space is subjected to reveal its dilapidated surfaces and paradigmatic monumentality of the Soviet modernist project. The white figures occupying the hall awkwardly stage their utopian physicality, performing a mass Socialist ritual showcasing their victory against the laws of physics, demonstrating the supremacy of engineered bodies, technologies and souls. The white elements are infantile, dysfunctional and passively aggressive; their multiplicity induces a dry, suffocating mental state of diligent stagnation permeating the everyday, echoing difficult histories of invisible control, past and present, local and global. This is White Suprematism, an exhibition by Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys.
Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys. White Suprematism
This exhibition is supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and made possible with special thanks to Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin, and Gavin Brown’s enterprise New York/Rome.