Kipras Černiauskas

2013-2017 BA in monumental arts department, Vilnius Academy of Arts. 2018-2020 MA in site-specific art department, Vilnius Academy of Arts. His main body of work consists of oil painting, but his practice of it doesn’t end in the studio. A very important part of artist work is done combining painting with traveling (hiking) and looking for harsh conditions to paint on purpose. For example, painting while living in a tent during winter. Artist believe it gives a painting new qualities that cannot be done in the studio. In 2018 artist together with his colleague bought a rubber boat and went on a 35-day long adventure going through all of Lithuanian rivers from east to west while painting canvases on the way. After that, they presented two museum-like exhibitions: “Kintai Arts” residency, Kintai 2018; “Routers Art Lab”, Vilnius 2019. The aim of the journey was to look at things slowly as today we are living in a very fast time and to reinvent the now dying plen-air tradition. It was gathering information through photos, paintings, writing, and communicating with a live Facebook audience.

Artistic interests and themes other than the practice of wild painting, mostly consist of looking into human nature, coping with life in the modernity, questions about a free will, searching for a kind of not simulated experience, a certain amount of naivety. Metamodernism. Shows to mention would be “The Look” (Žvilgsnis) Gallery “Akademija”, Vilnius and “watercolours and obscenity” (Akvarelės ir pošlybės” 2018. Šv. Jonų gatvės galerija, Vilnius. “The Look” was an exhibition dealing with the way we look at things. Inspired by A. Schopenhauer’s ideas on the world as representation “watercolours and obscenity” was also partly inspired by Schopenhauer’s other idea of life in concreto and in abstracto. In those years of studies, artist has also done a few murals with his course mates and participated in few international projects of which the most important would be “In the trails of boat refugees” 2016 organized by Gotland Art Centre in Visby, Sweden. His MA work is called The Decameron. The Decameron is a series of 10 paintings that are based on a non-existing movie that would be a modern interpretation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s book “The Decameron”. It was presented in the graduation shows (June 2020). This series takes a metamodern approach.