One of the most original photographers of the late 20th century in Klaipėda, a representative of the Lithuanian photographic underground, a member of the avant-garde group "Doooooris", and a member of the Lithuanian (post-)movement avant-garde. It is safe to say that this artist is one of the pillars on which the port city's contemporary art tradition rests. It is a common cliché, and one that still persists, that the art avant-garde of the second half of the 1990s and the first half of the 1990s, and new ideas, were concentrated only in Vilnius. However, this was not the case. New ideas matured and developed in their own way not only in the capital, but also in the whole of Lithuania, or at least in the larger cities of Kaunas, Klaipėda and Alytus. The port city is quite rich and interesting in this respect. Urbonas is one of the main figures in the renewal of photography/art in Klaipėda in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Urbonas started to take photographs in his youth, but the beginning of photography as a conscious socio-aesthetic system can be traced back to approximately 1982-1985.In 1982, Urbonas started to simply record the life of hippies, which later developed into a series with a more or less refined aesthetic program. This cycle can now be counted among the first examples of conceptualism in Lithuania (together with Algirdas Šeškaus' photographs, Gintaras Zinkevičius' Soldier's Diary, Mindaugas Navakas' Vilniaus sąsiuviniu, collages by Ramūnas Paniulaitis, and the like). Around 1985, Urbonas began to express himself as a determined photographer - in other words, photography became no longer a hobby, but a way of life and a profession.
According to Urbonas's colleague and one of the most interesting photographers in Klaipėda, Remigijus Treigis, Raimundas "always carried a camera with him and never rearranged things when taking pictures. He captured what he saw. He always told the truth when taking pictures, never lied" ("36 shots. Raimundas Urbonas", Vakarų ekspresas, 19 April 2009). He was not a "studio" photographer, he was concerned with the (aesthetic) truth and with reality that could not be transformed or recomposed. Urbonas' aesthetics is partly close to the aesthetics of the social landscape of the 1990s, but he did not seek to reveal social insignificance, even though socio-existential "insignificance" was in itself one of the characteristic features of the 1990s. According to Urbonas's colleagues, he had, as it were, ended the epoch of the social landscape, because the social landscape of Urbonas and of the other photographers who debuted in the second half of the 1980s already had a slightly different character than that of their colleagues in the first half of the decade. Urbonas did not try to expose this reality, but rather saw it through a veil of nostalgia, mystery, sadness, the passing of time, a specific melancholy.
Urbonas did not have a coherent system of photography, because he took photographs in a rather fragmented way, he could create several unrelated cycles at the same time, or he could take single photographs - he would capture objects, random still lifes observed in the household (or photographed in the photographs), towns of Lithuania, domestic scenes, Prussia etc, but his eclectic photography was united by a more or less unified melancholic, even slightly pessimistic aesthetic system, or perhaps rather a feeling. It is also interesting that, although Urbonas was not a "studio" photographer, he usually took photographs in a closed space - his cramped apartment in Klaipėda. And it was this cramped world that became a whole aesthetic universe for the photographer - where space, objects, light, life itself became magical in photography and in photographs.
One could say that Urbonas was a magician of the household. In what would seem to others to be a poor and dull everyday life, a random accumulation of objects, he saw a secret life, an alternative spacetime. Often, he would compose two unrelated shots, but when combined, they created a mystical meaning. The people who came under Urbonas's lens - relatives, friends, colleagues - are now also a kind of chronicle of Klaipėda at a certain time.
A few words should be said about the Prussian series. This was a commercial commission to record Prussian signs in the Kaliningrad area. In 1991-1992 (before the Lithuanian-Russian border treaty came into force), he intensively photographed various places in the Kaliningrad region. His trips to the region began around 1987, photographing, according to Treigis, "out of love for the region, without specific orders" (Nida Gaidauskienė, "Raimundas Urbonas Zona", in: Raimundas Urbonas, East Prussia, Klaipėda: Kitas takas, 2012, p. 12). Later, a contract was signed with a German publishing house, but the project fell through. However, Urbon's project of capturing the wandering, vanishing spirit of East Prussia, his inner and civic project, did not fail.
Urbon did not only capture specific landscapes, but as if he was trying to find a few more historical and spiritual levels of Prussia. He tried to touch the opening of time. It is also clear that for Urbon himself, this experience of taking photographs, of coming into contact with a culture that had disappeared and was in the process of being actively destroyed, was particularly important. "It wasn't just Kaliningrad that he went to - he would look closely at the villages and towns, stop at a remote cemetery or a picturesque river bend. Sometimes he would spend the whole day just driving along old German alleys, on pre-war cobblestones, just looking around, trying to remember all the places, the streets, the bus stops and the ruins. Some of the sights of towns or places would stay with him for a very long time - so long that he would go back and photograph them" (Ruth Leisewitz, "Remembering our explorations of the 'forbidden room of Europe'", in Raimundas Urbonas, East Prussia, p. 14).
Urbonas had hoped to have these photographs published in a book, but unfortunately he was not able to do this. After his death, several exhibitions of the series were held, and a permanent exhibition was on display at the Museum of the History of Lithuania Minor for several years.
An album published in Lithuania later published 87 of Urbonas's photographs, i.e. the majority of the East Prussia series, which were collected from the archive of Urbonas's widow, Rimvydija Urbonienė, the collection of Audrius Jankauskas, and from the collections of the Museums of History of Lithuania Minor and the Lithuanian National Museum.
Another particularly important thing for the genesis of avant-garde art not only in Klaipėda, but in Lithuania as a whole, was the joint activity of three painters and two photographers (Audrius Jankauskas, Arvydas Karvelis, Saulijus Kanapecas, Remigijus Treigis and Raimundas Urbonas) in the group "Doooooris" (1989-1995). The members of the group used to work collectively - usually they would cover up, paint over, or make collages out of the (un)successful photographs of Urbonas or Treigis. At that time, the group's creativity and fooling around were peripheral, almost marginal (like, say, the conceptualism of Gintaras Znamierowski's and Donatas Srogis's conceptualism of the Lazdynai district, cultivated in 1988-1994), and it was also characterised by sarcasm, reminiscent of a parody, and was "unreasonable". However, from today's perspective, the group's activities were vivid, performative, and had a distinctive conceptualism. The group's legacy can also be classified not only as the golden fund of avant-garde art in Klaipėda, but also in Lithuania as a whole in the late 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. Urbonas's life was suddenly and absurdly cut short by Hurricane Anatoly. There are also signs of a terrifying mysticism here.
