“Beam in Marsh” by Mykolė

“Contemporary painters were becoming interested in the landscape genre again in the late 90s. Writing about this phenomenon, critic Robert Fleck notices the impact that the changed nature has on their landscape paintings. According to him, “Landscape today is imagined only as artificial. In Europe, industry, agricultural farming and spatial planning have long shaped nature to the most remote regions. It is an advantage for painting – the landscape no longer evokes nostalgia.”

For Mykolė, the landscape is also always a reflection of cultural and economic relations, but for her that does not extinguish the longing for nature, the need to admire the landscape. The artist depicts landscapes transformed according to human needs, places that can be approached and accessed.

Mykolė’s range of vision contains landscapes at the approaches to cities, penetrated by unstoppable urbanization. The roads are laid with asphalt, paths paved with tiles, water bodies surrounded by strips of concrete slabs, the groups of trees, bushes and meadows are shrinking, the balance between natural and artificial is being lost. In search of less affected nature, the artist travels to lakes, river valleys, forests and marshes. All these landscapes are empty. Not even tiny human figures (staffage) can be found. However, even here we find traces of “invasive” human activity: old car tires dropped at the edge of the forest, building structures that have lost their functions. In her paintings, Mykolė does not leave such findings out of romantic landscapes. A concrete beam stuck in an amazingly beautiful blooming marsh is not an immediately noticeable foreign body. However, the sight disturbs the viewer for a long time. Such landscapes changed by human activity, in turn, change the person herself.

There is nothing threatening, dangerous or mysterious in Mykolė’s landscapes. She doesn’t threaten with ecological catastrophes but simply reflects on the landscape as a break between nostalgia and consumption.”

Curator of the exhibition Prof. Raminta Jurėnaitė

Mykolė Ganusauskaitė (b. 1987) studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where she received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees. From 2015 till 2017 she lived and worked in Copenhagen and in 2017 moved to Vilnius. She has organized over 20 solo exhibitions in Lithuania, France and Denmark, participated in dozens of group projects in Lithuania, France, Denmark, USA and elsewhere. She won the Young Painter’s Prize in 2013 and has been a member of Lithuanian Artists’ Association since 2016.

The exhibition is part of the gallery’s creative program, funded by the Lithuanian Artists’ Association and Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Photos by Giedrius Akelis