Saulės!

2019 04 24 – 2019 06 08

The exhibition features works by Ina Budrytė painted during last autumn and winter. It was the time, according to the artist, ‘dominated by gloominess, thick clouds and greyness broken by very rare spells of sunshine. (…) In spring the sun came out glorious (…) My work does not abound in sunlight, so I felt like attracting more of it. The exhibition is called ‘Sun!’ It is a title /incantation/ wish in one, a desire to intensify the act of painting, to immerse being and dreams into light’.

The art critic Aistė Paulina Virbickaitė: 
‘In thinking about Ina Budrytė’s paintings, I recalled the narrator from the book The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and his drawing of an elephant swallowed by a boa constrictor, mistaken by the adults for a poorly drawn hat. As well as his sheep he drew for the Little Prince, or rather, a box with a sheep he asked for in it. The Little Prince would be a good viewer of the paintings by Ina Budrytė. The rest of us need more effort to calm down the mind that cannot not find concrete answers and start playing. Then only can we accept each painting by Ina as a separate planet, sometimes a very small one, with one, sometimes more inhabitants: humans, animals, plants. 
The paintings by Ina take their beginning from impressions of her personal life, from her environment or the flow of news. This year’s exhibition really dedicates quite a lot of attention to topicalities, but here they are transformed into signs. ‘It is not an illustration’, the cartooned figures seem to say. Painted in a clearly visible brushwork, they exist in a space where perspective is ignored. The inspirations from real life no longer matter; what matters is where they take the viewer. 
Above all, these paintings-planets evoke the sense of solitude. The figures are lonely even when not alone on the plane of the painting. You are also alone, and you can enter that world of solitude on canvas as there is always empty space left for a visitor. In each of these paintings, the viewer is supplied with a thread of recognizable contours of an object, after that one is free to feel disconcerted, ironic or amused. We can even imagine that we can decide the fate of these paintings, depending on whether we get scared by the flag-bearer in the painting Footsteps or laugh at him. We can also either ascend to the Lighthouse or descend to the garden in The Lighthouse; we can fret that the jaws of a dinosaur are soon to swallow the little bird or fly together with them chasing the wind.’

Ina Budrytė is a painter and a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. She has given over 15 solo exhibitions and participated in over 30 group exhibitions. In 2018, THE ROOM gallery in Vilnius hosted her solo exhibition of watercolours A Period of Two Blacks. 
Selected group exhibitions: 
The Baltic Bridges, International Watercolour Biennial, 2008, 2010, 2012
False Recognition, 14th Vilnius Painting Triennial, 2010
ARTVILNIUS, International Vilnius Art Fair, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2018 
Orangery, international exhibition, Užutrakis, Lithuania, 2014
The LAA Centenary Collection presented in Brussels, Belgium, 2018
Užupis, Responsibility for Freedom, a project during Kyiv Art Week, Kyiv, Ukraine, 2018 
All Art is About Us, the opening MO exhibition, Vilnius, 2018-2019
Q19: Memorabilia. To Inscribe into Memory, Kaunas, 2019 
Ina Budrytė received the Grand Prix of The Baltic Bridges of 2010 
Her work is acquired by the MO Museum in Vilnius and by private collectors 
Her work is covered by: 
Lietuvos tapyba 1960–2013, comp. Raminta Jurėnaitė, mmc, 2014.
Iš mano kambarių, exhibition catalogue, mmc, 2010.

Publications about the exhibition on press:

Serotoninas iš dažų ir drobės, Kristina Stančienė, 7md