Photos – courtesy of Gallery Meno Niša ©
“Sometimes I would make up stories about gooseberries; I used to lie in the grass and watch the sun bunnies shaking in the strawberry leaves; I had an enemy spider in the woodshed,” says artist Sandra Kvilytė, who is opening an exhibition at the Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša on 29 February at 6 pm. The exhibition The Diver is the young artist’s second solo exhibition in Lithuania and her first in Vilnius.
Kvilytė graduated from the Kaunas faculty of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, participated in several group exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad, and her works have been included in the M. K. Čiurlionis Museum’s 21st-century collection.
In her work, the artist explores motifs that are familiar to us, motifs that we find in our everyday environment, while at the same time paying sensitive attention to the monotonous domestic life and the emotional states that emerge from it. Often, childhood memories unexpectedly enter the themes of the works, and the artist is characterized by her ability to link and connect different spatiotemporalities of her life, and sometimes even to deform the reality visible to the eye to a fictional, but at the same time, real content.
The Diver is part of the long-standing Meno Niša project Art Space for Young Artists, which the gallery has been implementing since 2011 with a special focus on young, promising artists.
“We are pleased to have produced many young artists in the twenty-two years of the gallery’s existence, whom we have successfully presented at art fairs and exhibitions abroad. Last year we announced an open competition for young artists to organize exhibitions at the gallery, and that is where we saw Sandra, whose work stood out for its style, sensitive reflections of everyday memories in painting,” said Diana Stomienė, the head of the gallery Meno Niša.
The Diver is a personal exhibition of paintings that invites you to look at every day, borderline human states. It is an experimental leap into the primordial relationship between one’s inner and outer surroundings, seeking a purified sense of self, and a simplification of the environment and objects. It focuses on the principles of ordinariness and self-care. The exhibition combines different spatiotemporalities of life, incorporates childhood memories and fictionalized plots of place and action. Gradually descending from the shore of the noise of consciousness to the bottomless bottom of the subconscious in the space of terra nullius, another amplitude of the artist is revealed – THE DIVER.
When asked about the idea of the exhibition, S. Klivytė said that it was born out of her own way and outlook on life and the years of going through puberty spent with her grandparents in the countryside.
“In a quiet, slowed-down everyday life, surrounded by nature, I created for myself a luxury, maybe even a game, about seeing the world with my own eyes. Sometimes I would make up stories about the gooseberry tree, I would lie down in the grass and watch the sun bunnies twitching in the strawberry leaves, and I had an enemy spider in the woodshed. That is why the title The Diver (diving, changing location, moving, reaching for something, but at the same time being carried by the current) combines different spatiotemporalities of life, the adventures of a child and an adult, the existent, fictional and actual manifestations of everyday life, emotional states, and, finally, the process of self-exploration itself,” says the artist.
The exhibition The Diver will be on show at Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša until 22 March. Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša is sponsored by Vilnius City Municipality.
