5 June 17. At 30:30, the Lyceum Gallery (Danės g. 9, Klaipėda) will present for the first time the exhibition “Lobsters and Hares” by Evelina Simanavičiūtė-DUJA, a young generation artist, painter, performance artist, and Klaipėda resident. The exhibition will feature the work of the writer, playwright, performing arts critic Dovilė Zavedskaitė, inspired by the author’s book “Galleries and bay windows”.

Opening the creative kitchen

In the exhibition “Lobsters and Hares” the artist E. Simanavičiūtė-DUJA will present a cycle of paintings inspired by the book “Galleries and Bay Windows” by the writer and playwright Dovilė Zavedskaitė. The book’s texts explore the fragility of everyday life, abounding in dreamy, atmospheric elements that, thanks to the artist’s sensitive gaze, take on an expressive visual form.

Although the artist has already presented a number of solo exhibitions in the past, this one is unique in that the most important component is not the finished work, the result, but the changing, transforming and living creative process. Unlike many artists who keep their creative process under seven locks from the outside gaze, the young artists dare to share their sensitive and fragile creative drafts, and the viewer is unexpectedly drawn into a shared laboratory of the artistic process. As both texts and paintings are still unfinished, the exhibition becomes a rare opportunity to see how a work of art is born and the challenges it goes through before it becomes a complete work.

Slow-looking painting

Although the paintings created by the artist function as illustrations for the book, they also appear as autonomous works. With her characteristic sensitivity and observation, the artist speaks in her works about looking: at people, illness, childhood, fear, silence, memory and the small rituals of everyday life. The fragments of everyday motifs that intermittently appear in the abstract areas of the paintings contain a lot of symbolism and create a fragile, sentimental and poetic emotional field with a lot of space for the viewer’s thoughts and states of mind. Looking at the artist’s work, you feel that time slows down for a moment, and you find yourself somewhere between the temporal and the unconscious world.

Constant experimentation also plays an important role in Simanavičiūtė’s work. The author boldly takes up new creative methods, tries out different artistic techniques (pencil, acrylic, pastel), searches for new textures, colour combinations and compositional solutions. The author’s recent explorations are not

not only a recognisable artistic style, but also a way of reflecting on the fragility and impermanence of everyday life, the constant change and renewal of life.

The exhibition at the Lyceum Gallery will run until 30 June.

The exhibition is partly funded by Klaipėda City Municipality.