On Wednesday, April 2, at 6pm, the long-awaited exhibition Sync by artist Jurgis Tarabilda will open at Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša. Transforming the gallery space, the exhibition becomes a visual ecosystem, where canvases merge into overlapping systems, challenging the traditional notion of a painting as an independent, self-contained whole.
Art critic Rosana Lukauskaitė describes the context of Sync in the exhibition’s annotation: ‘The boundary between digital and physical reality is becoming increasingly blurred, transforming into a ductile, ever-shifting interface between signal and perception. Can we feel the fever of a streamer through a screen? Can a cold network of pixels convey the fear of a man in a war zone? Why do those three megapixels in the distance seem more significant than the four nearby? We are constantly searching for a recognisable shape, assigning faces to random lines, and imbuing jerky data with a soul.’
Jurgis Tarabilda’s work explores the relationship between the virtual and the material, the interplay of abstraction and meaning, and the blurring boundaries between the real and the digital, which continue to reshape how we perceive and understand images. In Sync, the creative process itself becomes an act of synchronizing two different forms of visual existence.
The artist often focuses on the practice of collecting – documenting phenomena that intrigue him, such as isolated clouds, or gathering objects left behind by people, like slips of paper with pen tests from stationery stores. For this exhibition, he brings together intuitive drawings from his own virtual space, which he himself sees as traces of touch on a screen. ‘These are intuitive gestures created on a touchpad, based on automatic drawing techniques – drawings made in virtual space and later precisely transferred onto canvas using paint, paint strips, and a roller,’ Tarabilda explains.
Artist Jurgis Tarabilda. Photo by Rytis Šeškaitis
For the exhibition’s architect, Gabrielė Černiavskaja, the idea of transforming the gallery space emerged from an in-depth analysis of Tarabilda’s work, his way of speaking about it, and his artistic interests. From their conversations, she gathered a set of key concepts: digital atmospheres, clouds, layeredness. The way the artist described this process of gathering information, as if it were accumulating upon itself, reminded her of a perpetually loading web page.
‘These conversations made me think of the word ‘syncing’ – like the constant, real-time updating of data in a cloud drive, such as Google Drive. The medium is never finite. That’s why I wanted to ‘cut away’ certain sections of Meno Niša’s space, making them feel like parts of a webpage that haven’t fully loaded yet,’ Černiavskaja explains.
Sync is Jurgis Tarabilda’s fifth solo exhibition. Born in 1992, the artist graduated from the Sculpture Department of Vilnius Academy of Arts. His work has been exhibited in Lithuania and abroad, earning several awards, including the Audience Prize at the Young Painter Prize competition (2017) and the title of Best Artist at the ArtVilnius Art Fair (2020), as voted by visitors. His works have been acquired by private collectors across Lithuania, Latvia, Germany, the USA, Estonia, Denmark, the UAE, Israel, Switzerland, and the UK, as well as the MO Museum in Vilnius. His art has been successfully presented at VOLTA Basel, Positions Berlin, Enter in Copenhagen, viennacontemporary, and ArtVilnius.
Sync will be on view at Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša until May 20. The exhibition’s architect is Gabrielė Černiavskaja, with graphic design by Marek Voida. The exhibition is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, and Meno Niša Gallery is supported by Vilnius City Municipality.