Kipras Černiauskas

Artist's country of origin: Lithuania

Education: BA Vilnius Academy of Arts, Site-specific Art Department (2013-2017), MA Vilnius Academy of Arts, Site-specific Art Department (2018-2020), Erasmus+ studies at University of Montenegro, Faculty of Fine arts, Montenegro (2019): Membership in Lithuanian Artists’ Association (2020)

Artist about himself: I work with a belief that information is one of the main characteristics of our time. The quality of it, the quantity of it and the speed of it. The nature of modern information creates problems such as stress, difficult psychological and physical conditions. An individual person finds it hard to cope with both global catastrophes and personal tragedies.

I am interested in things such as philosophy, religion, different angles of human nature, geopolitics, but I look at them through a filter of ways of modern information. I ask – how do we get to see those themes? In what way? The eye of the spectator is very important. No surprise that I make my paintings to look like movie stop frames or phone screenshots and sometimes they are filled with endless advertising.

I give a lot of attention to exhibition itself as an art piece. The surroundings of paintings are as important as the paintings themselves. So far, the last and most important exhibition was “380 B.C.” (2022) held together with my colleague Martynas Pekarskas in the VAA Exhibition Halls “Titanikas”. This exhibition was made to be like a road which could be interpreted in many different ways. Overall, it was about information, tourism, and relativity of time. In 2021, I have made a solo exhibition “Sanctity Translated” in a tiny gallery “8 akys ir ausys” which was about religious symbols in modernity. In 2020, I’ve made an exhibition “THE DECAMERON” in a giant industrial space in Vilnius called “Smoke Factory”, where 10 paintings that are a modern adaptation of Giovani Boccaccio’s “The Decameron” were hung from a very high ceiling. Back in 2018, me and my partner Ieva Tulaitė bought a rubber boat and made a painting expedition through the rivers of Lithuania from the East to the West. It took us 35 days. A year after the expedition, the exhibition “Painting the River” was held in Vilnius, organised by “Routers Art Lab”.

Although my main media was always painting, nowadays I explore Art-Walking as a performative art. I try to use walking as an artistic research method for researching how fast a way of getting information is different from a slow way of getting it.