Linas Blažiūnas (b. 1986) graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a master’s degree in graphics and has held 12 personal exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad. In 2011 the author won the best young artist award of “ArtVilnius’11” art fair and in 2016 the audience chose him as the best artist of art fair “ArtVilnius’16”. Having started with the traditional graphic technique, in recent years the artist has switched to the installation form and now creates graphic objects, paintings of light, and works with sound. The pure graphic techniques (i.e., print) used in his works are time-consuming and fascinating with their precision and craftsmanship. Linas Blažiūnas describes the artificial light often used in his creative practice as a phenomenon that allows observing the possibilities of human vision. The artist is concerned about the collision of natural and electric light, and the field of vision of natural and artificial light.
Linas Blažiūnas perceives his work first as a plane, a flat surface, and everything that appears in it is only reflections of the forms of the sensory, sensual world. When creating, he relies on experience, intuition, observation of the environment, and reflection on his living environment. The experience of real, life-like situations is his main source of inspiration for his work. Linas Blažiūnas calls himself a civilized man of the city, who observes nature and its various forms, which he transforms into mere flat memories.
When speaking about his work, Linas Blažiūnas emphasizes that he is constantly experimenting, trying to choose what would best express the respective motives. “I don’t like to stagnate, although there are times when I use certain methods for a long time. In such cases, I later abandon them and return to them only after realizing that I had not yet exhausted everything they had to offer.”
According to art critic Kristina Kleponytė-Šemeškienė, Linas Blažiūnas’ constant search for various ways of artistic expression is one of the main arguments confirming his status as an interesting, constantly surprising, and innovative creator. To accomplish a piece of work the artist uses technical means and their properties, transforming them into the content of the work and its meaning. The physical structure of the exhibition is also crucial for Linas, adding to the states of the images captured in the plane and becoming an equivalent element of the content of the work. He is an esthete of installations, creating a theatrical mise-en-scène in an exhibition space.