Project Overview:
The project “Birutė Zokaitytė. SHARP OBJECTS” was funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and took place at Vilnius Town Hall in 2021. It consisted of a two-part exhibition series held at Vilnius Town Hall and the Šiauliai Art Gallery.
Using an old, complex cross-cut wood technology, the artist created a new series of wood engravings and spatial objects. The wood cuts and their engraved prints, as impressions of thoughts and time, merge into a narrative about the connection between past and present, and the relationship between nature and humanity.
Art Critic Vaidilutė Brazauskaitė-Lupeikienė:
“Until now, we were still illuminated by the ‘restored’ Moon craters of Birutė Zokaitytė, with the subconscious tensions stirred by the works from the ‘Bluebeard’ series, and urban reminiscences and moods from last year’s exhibition. The exhibition ‘Sharp Objects’ presents a rare opportunity to view the artist’s latest works created over the past five years, which have been ‘carried’ and engraved, imprinted with all the experienced emotions, intuitions, grievances, fantasies, and feminine wisdom.
Birutė Zokaitytė tentatively refers to this very multilayered, visionary, and sometimes surreal – like levitating, floating through time, space, and between consciousness and the subconscious – imagery cycle as ‘Places I Have Never Been and Will Never Be.’ And indeed: it requires significant focus to trace the chronological signs, authenticity, and supposed sources of this cycle from a cultural perspective. The sources of inspiration here are countless, as are the myriad experiences surrounding each woman-mother-artist, a woman-medium, a mediator between strange experiences, images, visions, and this particular World, all these experiences carved into the hardest Lithuanian wood blocks. <…> Birutė Zokaitytė’s boundless imagination and her artistic, visual, and life experiences create marvelous narratives where women, like lighthouses emerging from imaginary seas, observe male chimeras with fish tails, where jellyfish hover on the horizon like flying objects from some parallel worlds, where it is both frightening and necessary to step into a secret-filled forest, despite the primal fear of the forest’s density, shadows, and dampness… <…> A particularly impressive large-format print will certainly surprise many viewers. Let us not forget that this is a creation and print of Birutė’s patient and talented hands, which, like all of the artist’s work, significantly expands our understanding of how wonderful prints and woodcuts can be…”
Exhibition Support:
The exhibition was funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
Photos by: Vytas Nomadas
