Painting on paper
2023 04 06 – 2023 06 03

THE ROOM gallery
Polocko St 17, Vilnius

At 6 pm, Thursday, April 6, THE ROOM gallery (Polocko St 17, Vilnius) opens Erika Povilonytė’s solo exhibition of paintings on paper ‘Snake‘s Dream’.

On view till 3 June 2023.

Erika Povilonytė on the exhibition:
‘A visible – or intuited line – catches sun. A snake dreams on the edge of a hot cliff. Her dream has neither beginning nor end, just circling, entangling and layering. All seems simple, familiar, innate, destined. Yet hardly there. Everything is just there.
Maybe the snake is going to wake up in a second and hide in a blue coolness of brush, and its dream will evaporate like morning fog. Or its slippery body will blend into a rough rock. The rock will absorb the glinting, leaving behind just its light shed skin like a present.

Meanwhile, just a fluttering waiting.
Just a moment filled with anticipation of self-creation or crumbling into pieces.

I rely on paper to create my work – like a horizon line, it separates an image from a real body. Like a meta space, it imprisons someone’s being or its reflection. I manipulate the plane of a paper sheet in attempt to give it weight, grain and relief. Sensitive matter wrinkles and shrinks, balks, then gives in, eventually becoming skin, bark or rock. The mythmaking of paper forms brings together morphological and architectural elements. Shapes of different nature whispering among themselves in tender enchantments and bewitchments share the same materiality as if claimed by the damp hands of viscous dirt, kneading everything into uniform mass and transforming every item or body into part of itself.

Powerful fortresses of the present day, marks left by the past, o, perhaps, the quietly rippling contours of tomorrow. The exhibition Snake’s Dream is an encounter of archaic forms with the shimmering of the present. It is a dialogue of the monumental and fragile, and a brush with the processes of decay and survival.’

Erika Povilonytė (b. 1997) is a Lithuanian artist currently based in France where she is part of a collective creative studio Les Ateliers La Volière in Dijon. The works by the artist created exclusively on paper have been featured by the group exhibitions in Lithuania as well as international events in Canada and France. In 2021, she earned her MA degree from the National Fine Arts School in Dijon and same year became a finalist of the Baltic Young Painter Prize. Her piece on paper Nudité II was included in the finalists’ exhibition hosted by the MO Museum and won a special Jury award for the subtlety of painting.

The opening night of the exhibition will be enriched with live balafon sounds. Gediminas Mačiulskis will play the African musical instrument balafon.
The exhibition is partially financed by the Vilnius City Municipality and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Exhibition on view: 2023 04 06 – 2023 06 03
Open: II–V 12.00–19.00
VI 11.00–15.00
Admission free.
For more information: www.facebook.com/TheRoomArtBooksWine