The Exhibition 'Painting, a Search for its Essence' by Kes Zapkus at Meno Parkas Gallery

2023 06 01 at Gallery 'Meno Parkas'
Author Echo Gone Wrong
Published in Events in Lithuania

“The exhibition presents a selection of works made between 2010-2022 representing my creative ambitions of this period. I would call this the cycle of my late painting as it continues, changes and reexamines. I believe in the special importance of the Art of Painting to history and human self-esteem.

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In visual expression complexity, cross referencing and simultaneity are very important to me intellectually and emotionally (due to childhood war experience and the complexities of thought). I see an example in the Sistine Ceiling, where a thousand faces, still lives, structures and myths create a form complex equaling a symphonic work. It is important to me that a vision carry associative and emotional material. Multiples of elements are ordered and active in my work. The inspiration is from musical composition, our world’s informational abundance and global concerns. The essential soulfulness of a work becomes the image, an underlying narrative is only secondary. That’s how my creative vision formed itself: completely abstract, complex in association, expression, representative of experience, displayed through structures of multiple details.

So given artists’ goals, what is left for a viewer to enjoy? Often, progressive ideas or evolutionary issues are not active to a viewer’s concerns. Is an artist’s attempt, with its uncertain aesthetics, frustrating to a viewer longing for familiarity?”

– An excerpt from Kęstutis Zapkus text ‘About the Exhibition, its Content and Ideas’

Kęstutis Kes Zapkus – painter born in Lithuania in 1938. He has exhibited extensively internationally and his work is in prestigious collections in the USA and abroad notably The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, Joseph Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., Museum Boymans‑van Beunignen, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, FL, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, Morgan Library and Museum, NY, NY, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. Exhibitions include retrospectives at Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, and The Vilnius Museum of Art, Vilnius, Lithuania, coincident with the publication of a catalogue Kestutis Zapkus, with essays by Lucy Lippard, Sandra Skurvida, and Marjorie Welish. Zapkus lives and works in New York.