Opening: 7 September 2012

The ‘Vilnius in Gdańsk’ Festival has become a permanent feature on the calendar of events in Gdańsk. The Laznia CCA will be showing the work of Jonas Gasiūnas, who works as a lecturer at the Vilnius Academy of Fine Arts, and has remained faithful to painting over the years. In 2009, he received the Swedbank Award in recognition of his contribution to the development of expanded painting. The artist is interested in the mechanisms that influence individual memory and in the historical changes experienced by those of his generation, who were born during the Soviet era. Gasiūnas paints with smoke, which in his paintings is a tool for blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality.

The Group Cooltūristės project concerns the problem of political freedom and individual liberties. The stereotypical image of Gdańsk is that of the cradle of the Solidarity movement, which initiated the changes in Central and Eastern Europe. The intervention of Cooltūristės focuses on the actress Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieślak, who was born in Gdańsk. In 1982, she was awarded the Golden Palm in Cannes for Best Actress in the Károly Makk’s film Another Way [Egymásra nézve]) The film was the first in the Eastern bloc to portray the forbidden topic of homosexual love. The intervention moves away from the stereotypical image of the city of freedom, focusing on issues concerning individual and artistic freedom.

Premiering during this year’s festival will be the VNO-GDN artist-in-residence program for Lithuanian artists. Its aim is to build a symbolic, creative bridge between Gdańsk and Vilnius, two cities that are both near to and distant from one another, sharing historical links, but lacking, for instance, a direct connection by air. The artists in this year’s residence program, entitled The More I see, the Less I Grasp. White Noise, take up the subject of information overload and the noise created by today’s media.

ATTENTION! 6 September 2012, 6:00 p.m.

Opening: Andrius Zakarauskas ‘The Wrong Side and the Right Side’ Gallery of the Fine Arts Academy, ul. Chlebnicka 13/16

This exhibition of the work of Andrius Zakarauskas has been arranged in conjunction with the Academy of Fine Arts. His painting moves between the traditions of abstract art and figurative painting. In a series of works from 2012 entitled The Wrong Side and the Right Side, the artist moves toward abstraction, eliminating all figurative elements. However, Zakarauskas remains faithful to the basic principles of painting, which is visible in his bold brush strokes, and in the colours used and composition. In 2009, Andrius Zakarauskas was the winner of the Young Painter Prize in Lithuania.