Landscapes "scraped" from the memory and pallet 0
In brief: The exhibition of Agnė Liškauskienė "Horizontal Patches/Scrapings" is open at Kaunas Meno Parkas gallery from February 10 to March 5. A. Liškauskienė's works complement the current field of Kaunas (and not only) painting. However, in them, we will not discover new conceptual moves, rather a long-tested and approved modernist abstraction of nature, savoring of color, brush stroke and unexpected variations of compositions.
Perhaps it is not a new, but definitely a high-quality painting, reminiscent of long decades of ongoing Kaunas colorist painting traditions. They are being continuously and successfully developed also by Elena Balsiukaitė, who had presented her almost chrestomatic-looking colorist painting in the Best Artwork of the Year 2015 exhibition at the Kaunas Picture gallery. We could also find some similarities, albeit a few, with L. Drazdauskaitė's work, which can also be characterized by reference to nature motifs by abstracting and intensifying them. In short, we could continue to knit this web of associations and this only confirms that painters in Kaunas are connected to each other in one way or the other.
In terms of content, the artist's works are dominated by landscapes. And it once again confirms the proposition of our famous art critic A. Andriuškevičius, who said that Lithuanian artists, more than anything, are impressed by the landscape; it can even be felt in photography. In fact, A. Liškauskienė is exploring the landscape since the beginning of her career. This time we see many variations of it, probably echoing all of the seasons. We will find a number of works that create an impression of winter, which are dominated by cold colors, but at the same time there is greenery breathing the heat of the summer. Artist recreates these impressions from the memory; she is not trying to capture them by camera, so that later she could transfer them onto canvas, just like many young painters are doing now.
Greenhouse is a frequently recurrent motif in A. Liškauskienė's works. According to the artist, it "like some animal is living its life outside, always at the same spot where you see how it is born and grows old with the passing time and sometimes dies." Greenhouse travels from one work to the other, opening up with new colors, sometimes painted in more detail and sometimes completely abstracted.
