AUDRIUS GRAŽYS
June 12, 2020 / July 8, 2020
[UN]REPEATABLE
Painter Audrius Gražys returns to his hometown Klaipėda with the exhibition “Unrepeatable”, which has not been exhibited anywhere before. Although Audrius lives and has been living in Vilnius for several decades, his ties with Klaipėda have never been broken. He not only organized personal exhibitions, but also presented several international projects. Perhaps the most prominent of them is "Bee’s Art Spaces" (together with Vilmantas Marcinkevičius), when painters from Lithuania, Italy, the USA, and the Faroe Islands publicly created large-format works in open city squares. Two years ago, the artist celebrated the 80th anniversary of the first Lithuanian civil aviation flight Palanga - Klaipėda with an international project. Audrius Gražys not only paints, but also creates installations, scenography and video art. He has organized more than 60 personal exhibitions. In 2017, he was awarded the highest award of the Lithuanian Union of Artists "Gold Badge" for the versatility and reflexivity of his artistic creation.
The author, about the new exhibition "Unrepeatable": "Man, moving in the spiral of time and periodically returning to the beginning with already existing experience, also changes the form of the beginning, without repeating it anymore. There was a need to return to the tradition of classic Lithuanian painting: thick strokes, characteristic colors. In my latest works, the free stroke from the motif of verbs turns into silhouettes of women, in places hardening to a more tangible form and again melting softly into the canvas."
Someone who has visited the exhibition will be surprised that they have never seen such a paintings by Audrius Gražys before. Others will see connections with the painter's drawing that we are already familiar with. Someone will like it, someone will wave their hand skeptically. But in the presence of art, there should not be anyone who is indifferent. Leonidas Donskis, from Klaipėda, probably responded most accurately about the paintings of Audrius Gražys - "Nothing is insignificant in this world of flux and constant change. Look carefully at yourself in each section of time, because tomorrow you will lose it - this is the message sent by the deep, reflexive, but at the same time spontaneously versatile and unpredictable art of Audrius Gražys".
