Julija Fomina (PDF)
https://doi.org/10.53631/DIS/2014.6.12
The history of curated art exhibitions in Lithuania began in the late 1980s. The emerging curatorial practice is disguised as ‘concept-based exhibitions’. It was a way for art critics to show their peculiar approach to actual art processes and art heritage. It intended to create an alternative to surveys or ‘national’ and other than ordinary art expositions, promote visual art, define its value criteria and attract larger intellectual audiences outside art circles.
Art critic Alfonsas Andriuškevičius pioneered exhibitions based on a clear concept and compiled artworks of high quality and artistic value. Using a structuralist approach, he searched for eternal, universal meanings and their most accurate signifiers in Lithuanian painting. Against a background of grand political changes, Andriuškevičius seemingly endeavoured to establish a particular, unofficial part of ‘nonconformist’ art from the Soviet period, to present it not as a historical heritage of questionable value but as an integral part of the present art and culture.
From today’s perspective, both exhibitions curated by Andriuškevičius hold a momentous position in the landscape of Lithuanian art at the end of the previous century. They conditioned a novel approach to exhibition-making as a creative and scholarly practice by art critics, which fostered new attitudes towards art history and the present.
Keywords: art field, exhibition, curation, structuralism, concept