The Rooster Gallery kindly invites you to the exhibition “M Cyclone” by the painter Andrius Zakarauskas, which will be open from November 9 to 19 at TechArts creative industries center / Rupert (79 Vaidilutės st., Vilnius). The opening of the exhibition will take place on November 9 at 7 p.m.
In the works presented in the exhibition the artist continues to explore the painting as a medium. Zakarauskas focuses on the image construction process, which becomes the narrative of the painting. The main element is a stroke that takes on new forms in its constantly changing relationship with space. In this series of works, the human body becomes the main focus. The pictorial image is constructed from various parts of the body, often eclectically combining different scales, lighting and painting methods. The name of the series “M Cyclone” encodes gender ambivalence: the letter M denotes male in English, and female in Lithuanian. Fragmented, recognizable or deformed almost to the point of abstraction, sometimes joining into dynamic combinations, sometimes scattered, body parts form rich, painterly intense layers, reminiscent of topographical schemes or maps. Coloured masses, spots and lines suggest directions of air masses or trajectories of military forces, the epicenter and periphery of an explosion or earthquake, etc. For the artist, these pictorial maps, deconstructed classical structures of painting, first become a metaphor for emergence of an image, and at the same time open up to wider interpretations in the context of current ecological, social, geopolitical realities and offer reflections of the present and forecasts of the future.
The exhibition is part of a diptych of exhibitions organized to mark the collaboration between The Rooster Gallery and the artists it represents and the Young Painter Prize (YPP) competition. The gallery has been actively working in the field of young painting since its inception, and the artists represented by the gallery have repeatedly become YPP finalists and winners. The gallery contributes to this year’s 15th YPP competition by establishing the special prize The Rooster Gallery Open for the third time and organizing the accompanying personal exhibitions of previous YPP laureates – Andrius Zakarauskas (winner of the first YPP competition in 2009) and Eglė Karpavičiūtė (YPP 2012 audience prize winner).