Irma Balakauskaitė (born in the Ukraine in 1968) completed the studies of painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1995 and the same year presented her first personal exhibition. Irma Balakauskaitė is primarily a graphic artist, but also a painter, a sculptor and a creator of mechanical theatre objects. It was already during her study years when she and Vytautas Pakalnis founded an experimental puppet theatre called by the founders themselves ‘a mechanical theatre’. Irma Balakauskaitė has held more than 10 personal exhibitions; her works have been presented in Russia, Spain, France, Argentina, Norway, etc. The artist has created stage designs and decorations for more than ten performances. This is the third exhibition of Irma Balakauskaitė’s works opened at the MENO NIŠA Gallery. In 2007, the Gallery presented her graphical works; in 2008, her sketches and mobiles for a mechanical theatre were presented in the exhibition ‘The Living Pictures – 2’. This time, the exhibition ‘Observations. Other processes’ is dedicated to present the artist’s cycle of prints.
The artist about the exhibition
“In creative work, same as in life, there are periods when you don’t want to make any declarations, rather preferring to observe silently the processes going on with you, in you and around you… Silence gives birth to new forms and different ideas. What’s interesting for me in creative work is the emotional relationship between a personality and the surrounding world. When I get tired from passions and marginal emotions, I turn back to natural surroundings. I am observing the processes of growth, graphical rhythms, monumentality of mature forms, elegant cruelty, fading and silent death of nature. I am trying to understand and learning. Drawing brings me a lot of pleasure. In the course of time, fragmentary observations and works started developing in a cycle of Processes, a part of which is presented in the exhibition. The works are created in relief graphics. These prints can be called ‘the pictures of nature’, the conveyers of my sightings. Actually, there’s nothing personal.”