The Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania would like to invite you to Spring Exhibition 2019, which will present works of students from the Department of Sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA). The reference point for this exhibition is the annual open critique and review sessions of the Department of Sculpture, which allow audiences to see student works from all years in one space. Based on the model of those review sessions, the artworks on display at this exhibition are not limited by selection criteria such as year, theme or artistic direction. Curated with the students of the VAA Department of Sculpture, the Spring Exhibition 2019 provides an opportunity to see the works of fifteen authors that are distinctive for the consistent creative approach, ideas and aesthetic execution. In addition to this, the exhibition also shines a light on the collaboration between two educational institutions, revealing not only their ways of operating, but also what is fated to be unseen. In a certain sense, the situation of this exhibition is akin to a geological map, a diagram of a cross-section of the earth’s crust showing the uncovered geological layers and indicating what maybe lies beneath the surface.

The term ‘abstract geology’, suggested by earth artist Robert Smithson in 1960, points to the relationships between the external world, the body and mental processes and maintains its relevance today. According to Smithson, geological phenomena are not simply a metaphor for the processes of cognition, most probably, the opposite applies – there is a direct, as opposed to comparative, relationship between consciousness and matter. In Spring Exhibition 2019, the geological imagination takes on new guises and appears in some of the students’ works, sometimes directly and in a “smithsonesque” fashion – contemplating the interactions of earth and body, materiality and its manifestations, the inevitable link between nature and technology – and other times metaphorically – as a commentary on the institutional relationship that led to the opening of the exhibition at the National Library and the overlaps of popular culture and history.  On the other hand, much more than a unifying theme, geology is just one of the tools used in interpreting the principles behind the formation of this exhibition, the interaction between its exhibits and art tendencies in general. Among the aforementioned links with geological phenomena, an episode of exhibition geology can also be glimpsed. Spring Exhibition 2019 is dedicated to the 2009 exhibition “Leaps and Loops”, curated by the then curator of the Centre of Contemporary Art, Valentinas Klimašauskas, which displayed the works of five VAA Department of Sculpture students and was dedicated to contemplating leaps in thinking and discussion on different definitions of exhibitions and art. In its own way, this exhibition at the National Library continues to address the discussion initiated by Klimašauskas a decade ago on the continuity and relativity of the imagination and the importance of leaps in thinking.

Artists on display: Greta Eimulytė, Emilija Noreikaitė, Andrėja Puskunigytė, Ona Barbora Šlapšinskaitė, Lukas Strolia, Antanas Lučiūnas, Emilė Skolevičiūtė, Ūla Šukytė, Gabrielė Vetkinaitė, Marta Frėjūtė, Aino Sallamari Rantala, Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Julija Matulytė, Rokas Valiauga, Matas Janušonis.

Exhibition architecture by Gediminas G. Akstinas

Exhibition design by Vaida Gasiūnaitė

Brief information about the exhibition