Tapist, poet Antanas Martinaitis (1939 - 1986) is one of the most famous artists of the 1960s and 1980s. He was an active artist, teacher, lived and worked in Kaunas, and was a unique personality in the cultural field of his time, who left a bright mark in the history of Lithuanian art.

Martinaitis' worldview was shaped by his artistic family environment and the example and works of his father, the watercolourist and caricaturist Jonas Martinaitis, from an early age. Encouraged and supported by his mother, who was a teacher, he started drawing and writing various texts at an early age. He wrote and illustrated his first book of patriotic poems when he was only seven years old. His mature artistic work took shape in the mid-1960s, as the dictatorship of socialist realism was falling. Martinaitis was influenced by the ideas of the ARS group of Lithuanian artists, the Post-Impressionist, Expressionist and Magical Realist painting traditions. His work was inspired by Lithuanian folk art forms and the worldview that came from it, Lithuanian and world mythology, game scripts and characters from his childhood, fairy tales, poetry and the lyricism of Lithuanian nature. Martinaitis uniquely combined all this with his individual worldview, subconscious and active life experiences, and the images they dictated.The artist's favourite motifs of a bird, a horse, a lamb, a pot, a mask, an angel, flowers, and a woman as a participant in magical, sacralised rituals, a mother, carried over from painting to painting, gave his work a distinctive content.

Martinaitis' paintings are monumental and at the same time lyrical. It is characterised by multi-layering, vivid texture, moving, lively and interconnected forms. Figures, images of objects, densely filling the space of the paintings, form a unified whole. Underneath the outer mottling of the paintings, there is a strong drawing, a clear composition, a painterly order. Martinaičis is characterised by metaphorical language, the use of symbols, the expression of a psychological and inner state through painting, a subtle harmony of colours, a certain inner glow of the paintings, like the stained glass windows of an old cathedral. Colour plays a key role in the structure of a painting, and forms are constructed with colour.

The artist's creative legacy is extremely rich. It includes not only paintings, watercolours, pastels, drawings, but also poems, novellas, an unfinished novel "Amžinoji žvynė" (Eternal Scale), written conversations with artists, letters written to his mother, with whom he had a very close relationship. The exhibition presents only a small part of the artist's works from different periods - from his youthful watercolours, from sketches, drawings, pastels to paintings from the last period of his life, thus revealing the creative journey of a talented and original artist, and at the same time, showing the evolution of the artist's thought and the stages of preparation of the final work. The works are accompanied by Antanas Martinaitis' own texts.