Opening reception: 1 October, 6 pm at Pamėnkalnio Gallery (1 Pamėnkalnio St., Vilnius) and 7:30 pm at Tsekh Gallery (6 Vytenio St., Vilnius).
The title of the new biennial refers to its semantic and aesthetic character: OT is conceived as a platform and space for artists that develop minimal or minimalist language in their work with such keywords as reduction of form, reserved narration, aesthetics of silence, abstraction, monochrome, etc.
The Laconica biennial also seeks to bring visual art and other fields of art together, to generate creative ideas and collaborative projects, and draw attention to relevant contemporary trends and ways of thinking.
Artists: Jovita Aukštikalnytė-Varkulevičienė, Ina Budrytė, Andrius Erminas, Nerijus Erminas, Vaiva Frančiakaitė, Aurelija Maknytė, Jaromír Novotný, Eglė Ridikaitė, Renie Spoelstra, Birutė Stulgaitė, Takashi Suzuki, Gintautas Trimakas, Justinas Vaitiekūnas.
The artists of the exhibition are like modern alchemists interested in extracting ideas and converting them into new and pure values. Some of the authors focus on such concepts as light and colour, seeing them not as divine abstract emanation but as independent, material, almost physically tangible objects. Others seek inspiration from nature, perceiving it as a fundamental, primordial “theory of everything”. Still others borrow images from their environment and reduce them many times, making them so dense and concentrated that they reach the state of singularity similar to the black holes.