On 12 September, the exhibition A Snowfall of Salt by Belgian-based artist Paulius Šliaupa, included in the program of the Lithuanian season in France in 2024, opens at the Centre Intermondes, in La Rochelle, France. The artist, represented by the Vilnius city gallery Meno Niša Gallery, will exhibit his newly created paintings and video works.
A Snowfall of Salt curator – Daniella Géo; here you can read curator’s text about the exhibition.
In 2022, Paulius won the top prize in the ArtContest in Brussels. The prize included a creative residency and an exhibition at the Centre Intermondes, an international cultural center in La Rochelle, France. Paulius Šliaupa created the works for the exhibition A Snowfall of Salt during his residency at the Centre Intermondes, exploring the Bay of Biscay and looking for connections with the Lithuanian landscape. The title of the exhibition, A Snowfall of Salt, links the whitish and greyish winters in Lithuania with the structures of the salt ponds of the Île de Ré, on which Paulius based his work, and can be read as a reference to ecological issues – after a salt rain, the land would be barren. The title is also a reference to the fall, hinting that several of the video works would be created by drone filming.
As the curator Daniella Géo states, P. Šliaupa’s exhibition proposes a seeming contradiction that in fact implicates our inability to find balance. “Nature is the essence – and condition – of (all) life. However, nature and our experience of it, Šliaupa’s major subjects, have been drastically estranged in modern global societies,” – tells the curator of the exhibition.
Born into a family of geologists and brought up in Barteliai, a hamlet in Lithuania’s countryside where he still lives part of the year, Šliaupa has developed intimacy with nature and the clear understanding that we, as part of nature ourselves, are vastly exceeded by it. In his work, particularly in his films, there is often a sense of both the sublime and of normalcy in human’s experience of nature.
In dialogue with the videos, the artist presents a selection of paintings and objects. The latter derives from Šliaupa’s brand new experimentations with 3D printing, following his interest in recent technologies (A.I., drone cameras, 3D scanning, etc.) and their entanglements with our life and the natural world in general. The series Critters (2024) takes each the shape of a marine specimen found dead, desiccated on the beaches where the artist was shooting during his residence at Centre Intermondes. The starfish, jellyfish, and sea urchin that struck Šliaupa as magical then have been somewhat transfigured through the machine and symbolically brought back to life.
Paulius Šliaupa. Species 3, 22×17, mixed media, 2024
Paulius Šliaupa (b. 1990 , Vilnius, Lithuania) is a Lithuanian painter of the younger generation who has already received recognition not only in Lithuania but in foreign countries as well. P. Šliaupa holds a BA in Painting and an MFA in Contemporary Sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in Vilnius, Lithuania, as well as an MFA in Media Arts from KASK. Additionally, he completed the HISK postgraduate residency program in Ghent, Belgium. He was awarded the grand prize of ArtContest22, Brussels, Belgium, and the first prize of INPUT/OUTPUT 2023 Brugge, Belgium. Paulius is a member of SOFAM in Belgium and received their grants in 2022 and 2024. Paulius is a resident artist at Foundation Fiminco 2024-2025 Paris, France.
His works have been acquired by private collectors in Lithuania, Berlin, Ghent, Rome, Brussels, Rotterdam, Paris, and Istanbul. Paulius’ works are in the collections of museums M HKA, Antwerp, Mu.ZEE, Ostend, IKOB, Eupen, and SMAK, Ghent. Vilnius city gallery Meno Niša, which represents P. Šliaupa, has successfully exhibited his works at international art fairs in Paris, Budapest, Berlin, Cologne, and Copenhagen.
Šliaupa’s exhibition A Snowfall of Salt will take place from 12 September to 2 November at the Centre Intermondes in La Rochelle, France. The official opening of the exhibition will take place on 12 September at 6 p.m.
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– Paulius Šliaupa’s exhibition in La Rochelle is part of Lithuanian Season in France 2024. The Season is organized by the Lithuanian culture Institute and the French Institute in Paris
– The organizers of the exhibition are Centre Intermondes and the Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša
– The partners of the exhibition are: ArtContest, Région Nouvelle Aquitaine, La Charente Maritime le Département, Ville de la Rochelle, and La Rochelle Université.
