Artists: Danas Aleksa, Ramūnas Alminas, Henrikas Čerapas, Sigita Ūla Gečaitė, Žaneta Jasaitytė-Bessonova, Rūta Katiliūtė, Sybille Pattscheck, Karolis Vaivada, Tess Williams, Julie Wolfe, Darius Žiūra.
Curator: Agnė Jonkutė.
The idea for the exhibition came from a rethinking of the strict black/white monochrome of the 2021 Laconica Biennial exhibitions, which led to the contrasting choice to reflect on the meaning of colourfulness in the language of minimalist art. As the British art historian John Gage has observed, colour is first and foremost a code for communication, however difficult it may be to agree on its definition:
“We have learned to classify colours by hue but, as we have seen, colours have other characteristics, such as purity (saturation), lightness or darkness, mattness or shininess, warmth or coldness, all of which are of great significance to artists. One of the puzzles of the pre-modern illuminated manuscript workshops is the interpretation of the many colour notes for illuminators to survive in the margins of some manuscript pages, and which represent a code of communication from the workshop master to the individual painter”.
Furthermore, the exhibition is imbued with meditations on colour as a source of light. Colour and light function here not only as formal elements of an artwork, but also as almost physically tangible objects, pulsating more or less intensely or absorbing the stream of photons. In the works of the exhibition, colour is purified to an abstract idea, conveying symbolic or associative values, with the aim of immersing or transporting the viewer into alternative luminous realities.
The Glow is one of the events of the Laconica biennial of visual art. The Biennial was conceived as a space and a platform for artists who develop minimal/minimalist ways of thinking, using such keywords as reduction of form, reserved narrative, abstractness, aesthetics of silence, etc. The events of the 2021 Laconica Biennial were interested in the links between monochrome and minimalist poetry. This year’s exhibitions focus on the field of phenomena of colour and olfactory (scents) art.
Organiser: Pamėnkalnio galerija (Vilnius).
Partners and sponsors: Vartai Gallery, Meno Niša Gallery, Hemphill Gallery, Strategic Staffing Solutions International, Elska Coffee, Lithuanian Artists’ Association.
