The floor plan of the Pamėnkalnio gallery playfully suggested references to a basketball court, where a team of young painters seem to replicate the setting of their academic studio. Just as in the court, so in the studio, each artist is a crucial part of the team’s mechanism, fulfilling their own function with specific peculiarities, character and style. Such kind of “jamming” or “conservation” within just one space can be seen as a spontaneous formation of a certain group, a nucleus, determined by a most simple reason – just being and creating in the same space.
The “Jam” features a group of five artists of the younger generation, forming the team of the fourth bachelor’s year of painting. On the exhibition grounds, they exhibit their works in specific locations dedicated to each of them.
Kamilė Četyrkovska’s creative strategy is to translate personal photographs into the medium of painting. By deconstructing real archives, the artist tackles the issues of privacy, personality, memory and visual translation. The method, which allows one to keep a distance between oneself and the viewer, to talk not only about one’s own but also collective experiences, does not overwhelm the works with excessive, personal information, thus creating new, more capacious, more interpretable realms. In the paintings on show, the smooth, dry, clean surface imitates the plane of a photographic image and acts as an opposition to painterly overload.
Vasarė Kuprevičiūtė’s work is centred on the theme of the sacredness, as well as collecting, archiving, and “kunstkammering” its manifestations. Her main concern, and leitmotif is light with all its connotations. Not limiting herself to a single expression, the author spreads her theme through various media, genres, styles, techniques and means. The works presented in the exhibition, based on the method of constructing, reshaping and dismantling, emphasise the questions of perception of the creative process – the artist’s touch, the input, and the result – which are of great importance to the painter.
The main object of Lukas Pavilonis’s research is time and its relation to the creative process. His work is not limited to the medium of painting but also moves into more interdisciplinary and interactive art forms. Here, the questioned expression and the optimal act of fulfilling the theme becomes the main creative strategy, testing the limits of the painting medium, and analysing the relationship between the artist, the artwork and the viewer. The works of the painter are non-finite, changing, transforming in time and space, influenced by people – the viewers who visit the exhibition.
In her interdisciplinary works, Angelė Šyvokaitė explores the relationship between painting and other media, analyses the intersections between applied and visual art, and combines the specifics of professional and amateur art. The exhibits at the show feature an element of childhood – through handicrafts, the artist reflects on her past, childhood dreams and experiences. Without abandoning the attributes of painting, the artist’s works, which do not lack naivety, cosiness and intimacy, function visually as paintings, despite breaking out of traditional frames.
Aurelija Zaburaitė’s work is specific to a very organic blend of painting and drawing practices. A careful gaze, clearness, a precise outline made with a ruler, or painting limited to drawing are the artist’s traits through which the confrontation between order and disorder, the relationship between the tamed, the artificial and the wild, the one and the many are analysed. In the exhibition, through motifs discovered in her current close environment, the painter conveys dense, concentrated content with great visual ease and presents timeless, place-independent compositions.
Each author, while representing themselves and presenting a distinct creative strategy or field of research, also acts as an integral, adhesive part of the group. Despite this autonomy, in art, certain connections and common denominators can question the author’s individuality or their aspirations to be different and distinct. It is therefore not surprising that the young artists who have bonded together raise similar questions of interest in their work, use recurring expressions or motifs, and represent the same aesthetic beliefs. In this way, the act of the exhibition as a group presentation can evolve into a deeper reflection on this group of artists as a kind of “jar of ambition”, rethinking the position of the team as a collective, as collaborators, as friends, and at the same time as leaders, rivals and competitors.
Here, the witty and ambiguous title of the exhibition focuses on two meanings: the phenomenon in basketball wherein “a basketball is forcefully deposited directly into a hoop”, and the confectionary product of fruit and berries. Although the meanings have little in common at first glance, they aptly describe the group’s multidimensional and specific exploration of their environment and the visual communication of that exploration to the audience. After all, you have to know how to hit the taste buds too.
Curators: Kamilė Četyrkovska, Vasarė Kuprevičiūtė, Lukas Pavilonis, Angelė Šyvokaitė, Aurelija Zaburaitė
Texts and support: Vita Opolskytė
Graphic design: Eglė Kirlytė
Thanks to: Adomas Kaikaris, Kotryna Džilavjan, Justina Tulaitė, Vita Opolskytė, Arvydas Šaltenis, Liudvikas Kesminas, Vadim Šamkov, Eglė Kirlytė, Nestor Tyryškin
Organiser: Pamėnkalnio Gallery
Partner: Vilnius Academy of Arts
Sponsors: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Artists’ Association
