AURELIJA BERNATAITĖ

Clownshoes

2022 12 30 - 2023 01 25

Aurelija Bernataitė is a young painter, a Master of Fine Arts graduate of Vilnius Academy of Arts, a finalist of the Young Painter Prize (2019). The artist's first solo exhibition features her characteristically bright, apt, witty paintings, which speak about the unstoppable flow of visual information.

The artist's work reflects the constant flow of images that we encounter in virtual space, especially in social networks. The artist's work is inspired by the overload of images, information and misinformation. Aurelija Bernataitė's canvases are filled with subconsciously selected images from the close environment, virtual space, childhood photos, memories, popular culture and the world of art. Particularly striking are the works inspired by her grandmother's homestead in the Belarusian countryside, the blue colour of the buildings typical of those places. The artist's works are full of playfulness, irony, but also nostalgia, especially in the works that photographically record the motifs of her grandmother's homestead, which became particularly important after her death. The images in the paintings seem random on the one hand, but on the other hand, they are linked by a connection that is usually indescribable, an algorithm of the author's intuition. The painter's eye, like a spotlight, searches for objects to illuminate, to immortalise in painting. Both personal motifs and random images are given a special importance by painting, as if they are lifted above the everyday and raise questions about who is worthy of becoming the object of an artwork.

Her paintings include both clowns and shoes, but the title of the exhibition was also chosen semi-consciously from a never-ending stream of information. The expression, which does not seem to be naturally used in Lithuanian, sticks because of its imagery, the bright clown shoes are visually reminiscent of the artist's paintings. However, the term clownshoes has been interpreted as an insult to someone who is impractical, out of place, trying too hard to please, a loser, and therefore essentially a clown. Sometimes artists wonder if you are in your place, if you are really an artist, and maybe it's scary to be fooled and art itself is so impractical. Finally, sometimes you want to please the audience or some kind of standards, but in the end you still follow your intuition...

Curator Elena Antanavičiūtė