Aidas Bareikis
dal 20/6/2002 al 18/8/2002
Segnalato da
20/6/2002
Aidas Bareikis
Contemporary Art Centre - CAC, Vilnius
'Glad to Hear from You' is Aidas Bareikis' new installation created for his solo show at the CAC. Having collected the material for his installation in Lithuania, the artist has created a plot imbued with the dramatics of The Monument to the Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin (1889).
Glad to Hear from You
Aidas Bareikis (b. 1967 in Vilnius) studied painting at the Vilnius Art
Academy. Having graduated from it in 1993, he went to Hunter College in
New York with a Fulbright grant, where he received a M.A. in 1997.
The artist held solo shows in Leo Koenig Inc gallery in New York, Center
for Contemporary Art in Berlin, took part in many group shows in such
famous institutions as P.S.1 Contemporary Art Centre/ MoMA in New York
and various galleries in the United States and Europe: Eleni Koroneou
gallery, Athens; Queens Museum, New York; Asbaek gallery, Copenhagen;
Miller Durazo gallery, Los Angeles. Visitors of the Vilnius Contemporary
Art Centre are familiar with Aidas Bareikis' works from the exhibitions
"After Painting", 1998; the Soros Fund annual exhibition "For Beauty",
1995. The year 1992 was not less important - in that year the
Contemporary Art Centre was established, and Aidas Bareikis (at that
time a student of Kestutis Zapkus) participated in the exhibition "Good
Evils". The artist now returns to the same venue ten years later to hold
a solo show "Glad to Hear from You". It is a symbolic commemoration of
not only the artist's career, but also the existence of the CAC.
"Glad to Hear from You" is Aidas Bareikis' new installation created for
his solo show at the CAC. Having collected the material for his
installation in Lithuania, the artist has created a plot imbued with the
dramatics of The Monument to the Burghers of Calais by Auguste Rodin
(1889). Aidas Bareikis' original commentary on art history is sublimated
to a chromatic cry, post-apocalyptic chaos, entropic mass so typical of
the artist... However, unlike Bareikis' previous works, this
installation is less formless and more figurative in the Rodinesque
sense. Prepared phantoms, as if drowned in the remains of civilization,
associatively suggest gloomy thoughts about contemporary violence and
terrorism. A dump of various objects (mainly used for games) scattered
near ghost-like figures celebrates a politicized feast of life and death
in a company ironically entitled "Glad to Hear from You".
According to Rachel Kushner: "Consistently, traces of meaning-making
mechanisms range from personal anecdote supplied by the artist, art
historical references and the poetics of titles, to the sociological
connotations of technology, the future, and trash. But these things -
manifested as intimations of a post-apocalyptic condition, chaos, the
slippery idea of formlessness, and less abstractly, sci-fi tropes,
post-Soviet mayhem, war, Rococo, and the bedlam of consumerism - bob up,
are drowned out by their own unstable, self-negating structure, and then
once again resurface. Overall, there is fluidity from assemblage to
assemblage, if only in the contradiction of fractured, almost
schizophrenic barrages of meaning somehow warped into chromatic unity.
But amidst the mess, such contradictions are tidily mirrored by our own:
what is anxiety inducing also manages to entrance".
Opening of the solo exhibition "Glad to Hear from You": 21 June, 6 pm.
Contemporary Art Centre
Vokieciu 2,
LT- 2001, Vilnius
Lithuania
Ph: +370 5 2121954
Fax:+370 2 623954