On October 24 at 6 p.m., the Lithuanian Artists’ Association Kaunas department will open an exhibition by the group KAŽKĄ DAROM entitled “2²”, inviting viewers to look at landscape as an experimental field between reality and state of being.
2² is an experiment by four young artists with a genre that seems painfully familiar: sky, tree, mountain, horizon. But this exhibition is not about beautiful images. It tells more about what remains of the image when it is affected by urbanization, climate crisis, or personal disorientation.
The group KAŽKĄ DAROM takes landscape as a pretext – sometimes seriously, sometimes as a game of “what is painted here: a landscape or an inner image?” Four positions, four perspectives, four worlds, ranging from faded ethnic memories to new, post-anthropocenic geographies – ones where humans are no longer the only or most important actors.
2² depicts not a didactic message about sustainability, but a feeling. That barely perceptible sense that something is slipping away, changing. However, all this is conveyed not with grand gestures or expressive slogans, but as if between the lines. Or perhaps between the brushstrokes? After all, it is a landscape multiplied by four – not for clarity, but to raise even more questions.
The name of the group KAŽKĄ DAROM may sound frivolous. Like a casual response to an overly serious question. However, behind this name lies the desire of four painters to act, to search, to try, even if the result is not always predictable. In some works, the landscape is broken down into basic color relationships, in others it is transformed into a reflection of industrial aesthetics or even rethought as a by-product of consumer culture. Finally, it also encompasses the fact that the process of painting becomes an independent phenomenon in which both the image and the narrative dissolve. Lukas Marciulevičius, Eglė Marcinkevičiūtė, Ligija Žilinskienė, and Lilija Gotautaitė-Smalinskė each create their own painterly language, but their works come together in a common movement—the search for that “something” that arises between reality and state of being.
Exhibition curator Lilija Gotautaitė-Smalinskė
The exhibition is part of the Lithuanian Artists’ Union’s 90th anniversary program
The exhibition will run until November 15.
Address: Drobės g. 62-308
Opening hours: Mon–Fri 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Sat 11 a.m.–4 p.m.
