25 April 2022

(Im)Possible (Cosm)Us

Shards of a subject.

Shells of thought.

Things, details, shadows and the manufactured stories of their feelings – these are the main subjects/characters inhabiting my painterly world. They are like childhood friends, like silent observers.

When everything was turned upside down and reality melted away, it became easier to believe in fairy tales. To make your own looking-glass world. To live there.

My subject-woman, accompanying me for so many years, has taken on the universe’s form. I travelled a long time with the main character of my paintings, from bunkers and other claustrophobic spaces into the outer world, and now she has kicked off from the ground and risen up high. Into weightlessness. Her own infinity. Or perhaps the original embryonic form. The cycle of life. The Uroborus snaked into my art and mind, then etched itself on my leg.

I saw the images for my paintings in dreams before they were born in paint. Upon awaking, they seemed to me like the unsolved riddles of the universe – some of the most mysterious astronomical objects of the sky: “The darkest planet of all”, “The tiny too-smooth moon”, “Two planets orbiting impossibly close to each other”, “The inchoate galaxy of too perfect form”, “A huge diamond planet”, “Binary stars in a dance of death”, “A giant planet orbiting an impossible-mother sun”, “A star that should not have been born”, “A honeycomb planet that should have exploded”, “The mysterious glow of the Crab Nebula”. Some of the images I still carry with me – as yet unborn.

Concrete boundaries have melted away. Femininity merges with ecology, evolution, virtual reality, with the fragility of the human being in the universe – or the universe with all its celestial bodies and black holes becomes my body.

Some of my works are pandemic paintings that have absorbed the claustrophobia of individual isolation, collective anxiety, symbiotic needs, the cacophony of silence and its breath.

Monika Furmana

Translated from the Lithuanian by Rimas Uzgiris

The opening of the exhibition will take place on May 4 at 6 p.m.

Brief information about the exhibition

Date

4 May  – 27 June

Time

National Library’s opening hours

Venue

atrium, 5th floor

Participation

free entrance

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