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Indré Rybakovaité zeigt neue Arbeiten in der Städtischen Galerie in Lippstadt (altes Rathaus). Indré Rybakovaite konnte ihre Arbeiten in den Jahren nach ihrem Studienaufenthalt in Stuttgart sehr erfolgreich weiter entwickeln, derzeitig setzt sie ihr Studium in Dresden fort.
Es erscheint eine Publikation zur Ausstellung in Lippstadt. Eröffnung ist am Sonntag 31.07.2022 um 11 Uhr im alten Rahthaus.
Indrė Rybakovaitė—Conversion
Text by Andreas Moersener Städtische Galerie im alten Rathaus, Lippstadt Germany
Translation Gitta Bertram
Indrė Rybakovaitė, a young Lithuanian painter, had already attended the National M.K. Ciurlionis School of Art in Vilnius as a pupil before studying there at the Academy of Fine Arts from 2017. She spent her semester abroad at the State Academy of Fine Arts and Design Stuttgart, studying with Professor Holger Bunk. In the summer semester 2022, she will be offered an Erasmus scholarship at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts where she will study with Professor Ralf Kerbach.
Transitory Visual Spaces
Indrė Rybakovaitė paints landscapes with architectural elements, mostly in a semi-urban context. The painter uses broad, translucent brush-strokes in her large-format paintings. Although the paintings are spaciously arranged, she considers details when they serve the narrative of the scenery. On the other hand, however, entire parts of paintings are condensed and merged to focus the scenery on its essential parts.
On the occasion of the award ceremony of the Young Painter Prize 2020, Rybakovaitė commented on her painting, which she understands as a "psychologically" charged imaginary parallel space, managing without actors. Nevertheless, this space refers to happenings of a cultural and historical before or after in a spellbinding way. Indre Rybakovaite's paintings contain a barely perceptible moment of uncertainty, oscillating between the documentary, the historicizing or the dystopian. This gives her pictorial locations a transitory character: they can be understood as locations of conversion.
Inherent Dynamics
In the series of large-format acrylic paintings on paper from 2021, mounted framelessly on the exhibition wall, loose brushstrokes dominate the painting surface. By using large amounts of water to paint, Indrė Rybakovaitė turns her brushstrokes to a fleeting transparency. At the same time, through the paint drip structure, they stand like solidified relics of the painting process on the surface. The painting process as such is deliberately included as a topic and retained like actual "evidence". This inherent dynamic, still visible in the painting, refers to an occurrence that seems to have just happened. It the openness of the composition, this seemingly ephemeral handling of the paint also provokes questions of connection, continuation, completion and condensation of the, at first sight, formal painting. While the gaze of the observer wanders over the paintings' surfaces, she experiences how the colour condenses into landscape scenery which is essentially determined by architecture. The architecture in turn is defined and complemented by the inventory, the furniture and the paraphernalia of everyday living.
Ephemeral Moments
Indrė Rybakovaitė’s motifs in this body of work circle around the topos "resort". She does not treat it in a declarative and descriptive manner, but plays with its cultural and historical significance in order to evoke images. Moreover, the ephemeral nature of the brushstrokes evokes ideas of fading, evaporation, or the transformation of pictorial worlds: memory and the idea of traditional functions in cultural-historical terms fade in her visual places of trusted convention toward an uncertain conversion.
Historicity
Unlike Luc Tuymans, who in his painting sets visual anchor points for the the visualization and recollection of the historical, both individually and collectively, Indrė Rybakovaitė seeks the potential of the presence in the temporally opposite direction: her pictorial space functions as a conversion area of future events.
The superficial mood of her motifs, obtained in Baltic seaside resorts, is partly reminiscent of the sequence of images and the installation "The Quiet Shore" by David Claerbout, a student of Luc Tuymans. In contrast to Indrė Rybakovaitė’s painting, however, his black-and-white photography or film still installation linked to the Breton seaside resort of Dinard sometimes show juvenile protagonists. Used as repoussoir figures, they allow an expansion of the pictorial space into depth, and, as identification figures, they additionally help to conjure up childhood reminiscences—in this case, too, both individually as collectively.
Psychologically Charged Rooms
Indrė Rybakovaitė moors and anchors her painting to seemingly similar experiences and considerations, but without having to commit actors in the picture. Relics of their existence, especially the Baltic bath architecture or abandoned water sports equipment of the off-season, such as boats, play structures and cable cars, in an uncanny way create a paradoxical presence of the absent and their future, anticipated endeavours. Rybakovaitė, however, rather considers her pictorial spaces as purely physical, three-dimensional spaces that are "psychologically" charged and contain a hidden narrative or even potential for development „I was more interested in its scenery, in the psychology of the space.“ Such a space should be understood as a condition of possibilities for a future scope of action.
For this reason, due to her concept of painting, the introduction of actors in her images is obsolete here. „I was interested in depicting empty scenes, which have a potential of the upcoming action, or tension from previous events“. It is important to her that a narrative can develop as a pictorial projection in the context of an architecturally determined scenery.
Powerful Potentials
Recent works, which she developed from 2022 onwards, decidedly concentrate on pictorial spaces defined by architecture. By reducing the gestural, her brushstrokes calm down to a finer painting. The formats of the paintings become smaller and the colour composition becomes duotone or monochromized. The visual space appears concentrated on a scenery determined by architecture. Visual space is reduced in favor of model-like and surreal-looking buildings in project status, inherently threatening or unreal in lighting situations that often seem nocturnal. These utopian-looking building complexes are a new central motif and appear like powerful potentials that dominate space and alter it.
Her 2022 scenarios seem depopulated, possibly developed from the perspective of rigorous planners. They represent futurological, culturally innovative forms of civilization and involve the viewer in a thought-provoking utopia. Whether one sees an allusion to a dystopian alienation by means of transhumanist tendencies or another industrial revolution, Indrė Rybakovaitė leaves it to the observers' possibilities of interpretation and their imagination.
1- Luc Tuymans, Das Auftauchende und das Verschwindende (the appearing and the disappearing) in German language- a talk by Heinz-Norbert Jocks, in, Kunstforum International, Bd. 258: „Mich reizte das Nachzeichnen des mir Eingeprägten, also die Aufbewahrung des Nachbildes von etwas Abwesendem, das dadurch anwesend bleibt, mehr als der direkte Kontakt und alles Psychologische. Allein das Bild zählte. Dabei sind diese Bilder organisch entstanden. Dem Ganzen ging eine Bildvorstellung voraus, wie es aussehen soll. Diese versuchte ich durch Malen hervortreten zu lassen.“
1- https://www.kunstforum.de/artikel/luc-tuymans-7/; abgerufen am 07.06.2022
2- As shown in exhibition „Constable, Delacroix, Friedrich, Goya. Die Erschütterung der Sinne“, Albertinum, Dresden, 2013
3- Indre Rybakovaite, quote from expose „Resort“, 2018: „I was more interested in its scenery, in the psychology of the space.“
4- Indre Rybakovaite, aquote from expose „Resort“, 2018: „. I was interested in depicting empty scenes, which have a potential of the upcoming action, or tension from previous events“.
Text by Andreas Moersener, Städtische Galerie, Lippstadt, 31.07.2022
Translation by Gitta Bertram and Holger Bunk
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