Painting exhibition "2²"

July 10 – August 2, 2025, the Šiauliai Art Gallery will host the painting exhibition "2²".

The exhibition opening event will take place on Thursday, July 10, at 5:30 PM. Admission to the opening is free of charge.

“2²” is an experiment by four young artists working with a genre that seems painfully familiar: sky, tree, mountain, horizon. But this exhibition is not about pretty landscapes. It speaks more about what remains of an image when it’s affected by urbanization, climate crisis, or personal disorientation.

The group “Kažką darom” (which roughly translates as “Doing Something”) uses landscape as a pretext – sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully, like a game of “is this an outer landscape or an inner vision?” Four perspectives, four gazes, four worlds – spanning from faded ethnic memories to new, post-anthropocenic geographies where the human is no longer the only or most important actor.

“2²” doesn’t deliver a moral lesson about sustainability – it conveys a feeling. That subtle, barely tangible sense that something is shifting beneath our feet. But all of this is expressed not through grand gestures or bold slogans, but rather between the lines. Or perhaps between the brushstrokes? After all, this is landscape multiplied by four – not to clarify, but to raise even more questions.

The name “Doing Something” may sound flippant – like a casual answer to an overly serious question. But behind it lies the desire of four painters to act, to explore, to try – even when the outcome is unpredictable. In some of their works, the landscape is broken down into basic color relationships; in others, it is reprocessed into a reflection of industrial aesthetics or reimagined as a byproduct of consumer culture. Ultimately, the painting process itself becomes an independent phenomenon, dissolving both image and narrative.

Lukas Marciulevičius, Eglė Marcinkevičiūtė, Ligija Žilinskienė, and Lilija Gotautaitė-Smalinskė each create their own painterly language, yet their works move together – in a shared search for that elusive “something” that appears between reality and state of mind.

_ _ _

Dear visitors, by attending the exhibition openings, you acknowledge and agree that the events may be filmed or photographed, and the images may be published on the Šiauliai Art Gallery website, in the media, or on social media platforms.