Within the Nationwide Gallery – the exhibition of the painter Rūtė Merk Tradition

“When getting ready this exhibition of Rūtė Merk, the Nationwide Artwork Gallery stands firmly on two legs, combining the historic and current instances, maybe even the “promised” future. The artist herself, who creates a unbelievable reflection of the well-known current with the technique of portray, conjures up us and, I’ve little question, will contain the viewers as properly”, says the director of the Nationwide Artwork Gallery, Lolita Jablonskienė.

The artist’s works flirt with the historical past of portray

Within the exhibition “Guarantees”, the painter R.Merk is described by Lithuanian and overseas artwork critics as probably the most intriguing creators of the younger technology, selecting classical genres – portrait and nonetheless life, utilizing conventional oil portray instruments to seize the archetypes of modernity and the shifting of their boundaries within the trendy world. Parts of the fabric and digital, pure and synthetic, concrete and summary worlds intertwine within the works.

In keeping with Inesa Brašiškė, the curator of the exhibition, the artist creates portraits from completely different fragments – digital tradition, private experiences and impressions: “Though R. Merk’s portraits flirt with the historical past of portray, they undoubtedly testify to not a mantle, however to sports activities pants and enterprise informal go well with pleat instances. It is right now’s popular culture, vogue and particular millennials. millennials) varieties representing the habits of a technology, discovered from fragments of the artist’s reminiscence, impressions and purposeful archeology of digital tradition.”

The exhibition options the twenty first century. nonetheless lifes

In keeping with the curator of the exhibition, a couple of hundred years in the past, nonetheless life painters tried to convey the concepts of mortality, the cycle of nature and indicators of middle-class prosperity with compositions of searching catches, dried fruits and picked flowers, and in R. Merk’s nonetheless lifes, the viewer will discover right now’s client merchandise, which have turn into an aestheticized trendy way of life and financial attributes of well-being.

“The magnified motif of the latte, which has nearly was an abstraction, claims right here to turn into an allegory of world financial networks and the tradition of nervous productiveness. The distinction between pure and artificial is blurred within the artist’s work. Blue orchids that don’t exist in nature, completely wanting equivalent artificially bred fruits signify engineering interventions on essentially the most intimate ranges of nature”, says I. Brašiškė, curator of the exhibition.

Screens in daylight

A part of painter R. Merk’s works will remind guests of pictures present in video video games and 3D manipulations, created with digital picture modifying packages. In keeping with the curator of the exhibition, the artist makes use of colours, visible results, modeling and composition of figures to create one thing that appears to be supposed for screens: “The melting, hazy, unfocused, surprisingly uncomfortable abstractions of the backgrounds of R. Merk’s work are additionally supposed, because it have been, not for the human eye, however for the machine’s eye.” , – says I. Brašiškė, curator of the exhibition.

The exhibition invitations us to assume not solely about what, but in addition how we see within the daylight of the screens.

Rūtė Merk (b. 1991) is a Lithuanian painter residing in Berlin. He accomplished portray research on the Vilnius Academy of High-quality Arts and the Munich Academy of High-quality Arts. in 2023 turned the laureate of the DAAD prize and gained the Viewers Prize of the “JCDecaux” Younger Artist Competitors. The artist’s works have been proven in private and group exhibitions in New York, Shanghai, Berlin, Munich, Kyiv, Vilnius. Her works have been bought by MO Museum in Vilnius, M Woods in Beijing, ICA Miami in Miami, Museum of Fashionable and Up to date Artwork in Geneva, Sifang Artwork Museum in Nanjing, and so on.

Curator Inesa Brašiškė

Coordinators: Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Austėja Tavoraitė

Architects: Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Mindaugas Reklaitis

Exhibition designers: Gailė Pranckūnaitė, Laura Grigaliūnaitė
Translated by Paulius Balchytis