Laisvydė Šalčiūtė is one of the most active Lithuanian conceptual artists of her generation. She creates paintings, artistic installations, assembled media works, photographs, graphics, drawings, and literary texts. She has organised over forty personal exhibitions and participated in over 100 group exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad. Šalčiūtė’s works are in the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Vilnius, MO Museum, Vilnius, and the M.K. Čiurlionis National Art Museum in Kaunas.
Šalčiūtė’s intertextual works are remarkably sensual, whilst sometimes also ironic. The artist explores the idea that our feelings are culturally formed. Such ‘learned’ feelings influence society, directing the motions, intuition, and experience of individuals. Šalčiūtė often practises artistic appropriation in her works, creating new meanings by taking images from different contexts and drawing paradoxical relationships between them.
In The cycle of art works Bestiary Šalčiūtė interprets the Anthropocene era in which we all live through the prism of medieval bestiaries and Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. In our epoch, humankind has become a radical force that alters not only its own but also other lifeforms’ fate and structure. Šalčiūtė approaches this phenomena (self-) ironically, as an expression of human POWERLESSNESS rather than human power. In these works, she tells stories of ECO-ANXIETY. Šalčiūtė questions and ironically visualize the binary of CULTURE VERSUS NATURE, provoking the viewer to ponder the paradigms of politics, war and biophilosophy. She encourages the viewer of The Bestiary to consider a non-hierarchical appreciation of all forms of life and the possible ethical, moral and artistic interdependences it entails.
Photo by Greta Skaraitienė