Magical bodies


T.2 Gallery (Vilnius, Lithuania) presents a painting exhibition Magical Bodies by artists Elena Antanavičiūtė and Rūta Matulevičiūtė. Both artists graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with BA and MA degrees (Painting). Elena Antanavičiūtė had won Baltics "Young Painter Prize" in 2020. Artists' works had been featured in numerous exhibitions and are in collections throughout Lithuania and abroad. 

E.Antanavičiūtė has been exploring the theme of the body in her works for some time now, inviting to discuss the standards of beauty, the relationship with one's own body, the body as a tool for one's own creativity, and at the same time as an abstract motif, where one can see both the landscapes of nature, and the human unconsciousness. The author's works also includes diaristic motifs from her close environment. E. Antanavičiūtė looks back at herself as an animal existing in her own body. Her works are full of fragmentary images of the body, small observations, like portraits of body parts, where the face is turned away or does not fit into the frame.

 R.Matulevičiūtė's paintings are dominated by the magical world, mythology of the Balts and other peoples, her works are an alternative utopian reality created by the artist. She identifies with magical, mysterious beings, questions of existence are solved in a utopian reality. R.Matulevičiūtė has presented performances and other projects ("HOT Salon" , "Wisdom Vendor"). For her, the persona of the artist and the image of the artist are important, but they are inseparable from the creation and development of the person, not only in art, but also in the practice of meditation and efforts to live a conscious, meaningful life. In her search for answers in the utopia she has created, artist does not shy away from hints of pop and virtual culture; the beings of the world of miracles seem to be aware of our reality, of pop culture and the art market. In her utopia, the author does not run away from reality, but complements it, tries to transform it, starting from herself, creating art without suffering and striving for awareness, but without losing her ironic, critical attitude. 

The exhibition seems to be a meeting of very mundane, sometimes landscape-like body motifs and images from another reality. These are two different, but nevertheless intertwined worlds, reflecting their place in life and art, the search for meaning. For the artists, art is a way for understanding the environment. The theme of the body, which has been dealt with in art for a long time, appears in the exhibition in the broadest spectrum: from realistic fragments of the artist's body, which seem to be a response to the images of the body that are explored in many media, to portraits of magical creatures. The exhibition is like a game of opposites of motifs, forms, similarities of meaning and content. It reveals the different choices made by the creative individual: one is to search for meanings closest to oneself, in the small folds of one's own physical body, the other is to create a whole separate world, a utopia, and to solve mundane issues there in a magical way