Adelė Liepa Kaunaitė’s Painting Exhibition
REGIONAL PARK
The exhibition runs from 6 to 29 October.
Opening: 6 October at 6:30 PM
A regional park is not geography. It is a state of being.
A protected area begins in the landscape, but continues within us. It is a place where nature and humanity, history and the present, community and personal silence meet.
In the exhibition “REGIONAL PARK”, Adelė Liepa Kaunaitė turns to the Lithuanian landscape not as a view to be faithfully reproduced, but as a lived experience. The slopes along the Nemunas, the flow of the river, the silhouettes of the Sudargas hillforts, the horizons of the lagoons, vegetation and traces left by human presence become points of departure for paintings in which specific places gradually lose their geographical boundaries and transform into inner territories.
These are not illustrations of particular places. Here, the landscape is dismantled and filtered through memory, the body and the gesture of painting, until what remains of the physical landscape is its state of being. The river becomes a flow, the hillfort a sign of accumulated memory and time, the horizon a boundary between what we see and what we feel.
In Kaunaitė’s work, the human being is not separate from nature. The human figure is part of it – sometimes clearly recognisable, sometimes almost dissolved into colour, vegetation and the materiality of paint. Figuration hides within abstraction, while from abstraction a body, an animal, a plant or a fragment of landscape emerges once again. In the large-format canvases, nature is not a backdrop for human presence. It becomes an equal protagonist.
“REGIONAL PARK” also speaks about preservation. We usually protect territories, species, landscapes and layers of history. But what does it mean to protect a place if we no longer feel that we are part of it? What, in fact, is a protected area – a piece of land marked on a map, or our ability to maintain a connection with what is alive?
In this exhibition, the regional park becomes a metaphor for a territory that each of us carries within. It contains places, people, water, plants, animals, the landscapes of childhood and things that may no longer exist. It is a personal archive of nature, continually transformed by time.
In Adelė Liepa Kaunaitė’s paintings, this archive is not still. Colour, gesture and large scale create a living, shifting landscape. It grows, disappears, overlaps and re-emerges. Just like nature itself.
“REGIONAL PARK” is an attempt not to preserve a territory.
It is an attempt not to lose the connection.
