Exhibition “Subjectivities” by Elena Antanavičiūtė

We invite you to visit the exhibition “Subjectivities” by Elena Antanavičiūtė, the winner of the Young Painter Prize 2020.

The exhibition will be open from August 26th until September 15th (during the working hours of the Kaunas Artists’ House)

“Subjectivities” is the artist’s story about her world, primarily her relationship with her own body. In the new series, the artist continues her study of the body’s fragility, temporality and the conditionality of the concept of body beauty. The exhibition mainly consists of the works created in 2022.

The theme of the body is eternal in visual art, but the modern context gives it new, unexpected meanings. The pandemic has highlighted the body’s unreliability, fragility and, at the same time, its importance. It has become clear that the virtual world cannot replace live connections; hence the bodily experience is irreplaceable.

In today’s world, the body positivity movement encourages you to love your body the way it is. Still, it can be complex and sound naive, especially when society has exceptionally narrow standards of the “beautiful”, “acceptable”, and “perfect” body. The author perceives the body as neutral. Neutrality suggests loving your body for what it allows you to do or experience, to explore the world, and not for how it looks. In Antanavičiūtė’s paintings, the body often becomes a landscape, which reminds the viewer that the body is valuable because this is the only way for a human being to experience the world.

Elena Antanavičiūtė won the Young Painter Prize in 2020. The jury, as Latvian critic Janis Avuotinis said, “was favoured by her sincerity and expression based on her personal experience”.

In her new canvases, the author not only continues to dive deeper into the experiences of the body but also depicts the closest environment, colouring it with the same subjective assessment. Her gaze stops at objects perceived as beautiful and cute—a cat, flowers. It is left to the viewer to decide whether the artist looks with irony or is she sincerely looking for peace, small everyday joys in a troubled world.

The exhibition is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
“Subjektyvumai” is a part of the “Changes” series of exhibitions and events curated by the Kaunas Artists’ House. This series aims to show the need for change, both in improving the creative environment of young, emerging artists and in terms of a broader context. Creators often tend to raise questions in their work about the relationship with the environment, which are often sensitive, not tangible to everyone, but inviting to experience everything differently—significantly transforming the relationship.