Kazimieras Brazdžiūnas (b. 1991) is a young-generation painter. In 2018, he graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with an MA in painting. Since 2016, he has been taking part in group exhibitions, and held several solo exhibitions. His work...
Kazimieras Brazdžiūnas (b. 1991) is a young-generation painter. In 2018, he graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with an MA in painting. Since 2016, he has been taking part in group exhibitions, and held several solo exhibitions. His work has been presented at the international contemporary art fair ArtVilnius and various other projects of contemporary art. In 2018, he launched a platform for young painters Kontr-argumentas. He curates contemporary painting exhibitions, and publishes articles of art criticism in the cultural press.
In Brazdžiūnas’s paintings, shapes of physical and virtual reality are in coexistence and confrontation. In the painter’s work, appropriated mediated images (of artworks, computer games, motifs of films, TV, popular culture etc.) coagulate into unexpected compilations and alogical sequences, reflecting the visuality of contemporary culture, conveying the thick daily flow of screen images, and commenting on the urgent aspects of the totality of images and representations. While painting, the artist is constantly in communication with the history of painting as a medium, assesses its possibilities and tests its limits, continuously reconsidering the place of painting in the context of other, in particular screen, media (and their history). The artist not only refers to the digital media by imitating their expression by painting means, but also transfers painted images to the virtual space (an exhibition of his works in the Counter-Strike video game should be mentioned). This goal of transmediality and constant relying on the insights of the image theoreticians Jean Baudrillard, Nicolas Bourriaud and others, relates the painter’s work to the studies of visual culture, and contextualizes it in the wide field of image philosophy.
Though figurative, Brazdžiūnas’s painting often insistently resists narrativity and literariness found in separate works. By detaching images from their customary context, the artist emphasizes the impossibility of a consistent narrative and the fluidity of its meanings. Occasionally popping up, eloquent cultural and personal-life details as if would allow tracing the rudiments of narrative, but are immediately concealed and denied, leaving the works open to endless possibilities of (mis)interpretation. In his newest works, the manifestations of the artist’s identity are reduced to the minimum. Aerosol paint, elements of street-art (stencils, graffiti) and a laconic minimalist form depersonalize his works, as if asserting the author’s anonymity and a possibility of their mass (re) production. However, viewing Brazdžiūnas’s work as a whole brings out the interconnections of his works whose network conveys the spirit of time and offers a portrait of the 1990s generation based on authentic experiences and steeped in irony.
