The rusted wreckage of machinery sticking in the grass, strange, almost unrecognisable industrial objects, battered by the passage of time, a reproachful reminder of the reverse side of civilisation's progress - these are the works of the artist Algimantas Jonas Kuras (b.
This exhibition is like a poetic retrospective, reviewing the work of a well-known painter, laureate of the National Prize for Culture and Art, and highlighting its relevance in today's context of ecological and quasi-religious ideologies. The issues of human impact on nature, pollution, exploitation of natural resources, recycling of raw materials, preparation of the animal body, human-thing-mechanism are often cultivated in the current field of art, nature and social ideas. An eco-catastrophic mood pervades our everyday life and our future. Looking at Kuro's paintings, one can easily be fooled if one sees only ecological themes in them - the artist's goals were to oppose the prevailing ideological background and the propaganda of the optimistic reality of Soviet times.
His work and that of his contemporaries (Arvydas Šaltenyas, Kostas Dereškevičius, Algimantas Švėgždos, etc.) marked an ideological turning point in the 1980s, when the younger generation began to resist the Soviet official culture with biting irony, absurdity, kitsch, and banality-riddled creative plots. In his diary, Kuras wrote of his and his friends' goals:
"Aestheticization should be avoided. I propose to look more critically at all accepted phenomena, to oppose the bourgeois notion of taste, to mock (with works) at suspension, abandonment in art, or, on the contrary, to show one's own truth as an example; in a word, we have decided on: active critical realism."
Thus, the monumental mechanisms, the idealized, idealized industrial landscapes began to be replaced by the depiction of everyday situations and environments: meat-grinding machines, people in public transport or toilets, crops fertilized with chemical fertilizers from a helicopter... The artist was attracted by all that was considered marginal in the Soviet culture postulating progress: abandoned sites, storage sheds, rubbish dumped in the forest, which he not only used as painting motifs, but also brought back to his workshop as interesting sculptural ready-made pieces, from which he constructed assemblages or installed them in his environment.
Hailing from a rural background, Kuras cultivated a distinctive aesthetic outlook, which critics have called "the poetry of garbage". However, the real protagonist of his paintings is time, which condemns the material existence to decay and constantly reminds us of its transience. The only stable, unchanging things are the two spots - the earth and the sky. What is in between is only a momentary smile.
This is the first exhibition of this scale, presenting a broad panorama and chronology of the artist's oeuvre, consisting of works from Lithuanian museum collections, private collections, and the artist's own works. The exhibition also offers an opportunity to get acquainted with Kuro's original and artistic texts - witnesses of the changing times, reflecting the evolution of the author's ideas and the most important creative principles that laid the foundation for post-modern thinking in the Lithuanian visual arts.
