Ad Originem - Otwarta Pracownia

“Ad Originem”
Painting exhibition
Movement of Lithuanian painters, called “ad Originem”, exists approximately for five
years. The idea was initiated by Henrikas Čerapas and joined by young artists (most of them
were professor’s students at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius). The activity of these painters is
marked with the aim to create the alternative way of thinking – to refuse the low values of
commercial, institutionalized contemporary art world and resurrect ideas of humanism and
freedom of creation. The oeuvres of these painters usually have a sharp dramatic or lyricalromantic character of expression. The abstract structures of the visual world, the immediate
painting process, unexpected revelation of painting abilities are the most important. While
making exhibitions together, the painters are eager to create a vital and visual impression.
The title of the exhibition is a paradoxical designation of the painters’ position in the
contemporary world. Ad originem translated from the Latin language expresses the main
ambition of the project’s participants – to exhibit the primeval mode of painting which is
empathized in their own ways. The origin of this title is from the text by resistant Czech writer
Bohumil Hrabal: progressus ad originem, regressus ad futurum and it means that traditional
model of the progress is “turned round”. To be in the beginning for “Ad Originem” painters is a
possibility to resist surface conventions and to discover painterly meanings - never turning to
fiction or illusion.
In recent years three “Ad Originem” exhibitions, as a part of the project, have been
already held in Vilnius. “Ad Originem” painters are thankful to the Cracow artists’ association
“Otwarta Pracownia” for a possibility to make a show in the gallery.
Curators: Agnė Kulbytė, Henrikas Čerapas
Project organizer: Lithuanian Artists’ Association’s gallery “Arka”, Vilnius
The project is in support of Lithuanian Council for Culture, Lithuanian Artists’ Association
About painters
Henrikas Čerapas - professor at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius, a member of Lithuanian
Artists’ Association. In 1980-1987 studied painting at the State Art Institute of Lithuania
(currently Vilnius Academy of Arts). In 1998–1999 and 2014 - State grant for the creator of
culture and art. His painting is distinctive for an abstract figurative plastic (motives of the Land,
soil-fields, railways), which has a deep personal, existential content, full of theological meaning.
Agnė Kulbytė - lecturer at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius, a member of Lithuanian Artists’
Association. 1997-2003 studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vilnius; 2007 - art
licentiate qualification degree. 2009-2013 studied philosophy at Lithuanian Culture Research
Institute in Vilnius (Ph.D., 2014). The basis of her painting explorations is landscape as the
reflections of content and form. This emphatically introverted imagery aims to imply the
adequacy to the reality as an illusion of unchanging wholeness.
Algimantas Černiauskas – in 2006–2012 studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius,
graduated in 2012 with the master degree. His art blends the virtuosity of painterly, poetical and
musical visions, disclosed in the series of large format, abstract, colourful, decorative pictorial
surfaces, - as a parallel of unique, unrepeatable, organic processes.
Simona Merijauskaitė in 2008-2015 studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius,
graduated in 2015 with the master degree. In 2011 studied in Utrecht School of Arts. 2016 Individual state grant for the creator of culture and art. She often manipulates with the
unpredictable and unrepeatable painting energy, searching for its discharge and impact. After
discovering a stone as an organic form and motive for painting, Simona revealed intuitive
metaphors of primordial processes of creation-hood and the impetuous sense of archetypical
images.
Gytis Aštrauskas in 2006–2012 studied painting at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius, graduated in
2012 with the master degree. In his practice Gytis explores abstraction as a process of picturing,
dismantling and reassembling the abstract as a resonant surface.
Artūras Mitinas – in 2010-2016 studied at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius, graduated in 2016
with the master degree. Painting, in Artūras‘ words, is an attempt to preserve the „substantive of
the real“, to perceive, to grasp it – in a way of action, in the aspiration of form realization as an
unforeseeable process.