The solo exhibition by Gerda Paliušytė, organised by the Jeu de Paume in collaboration with the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius and presented at the Château de Tours in Tours, will feature two of the artist’s recent photographic series, Guys (since 2021) and Blue Flowers (since 2022). Together they explore the technological possibilities and errors of photography, the relationship between bodies and matter, the desire and the logic that quenches it.
The nude male bodies observed in Guys are abstracted, fragmented, and sometimes almost completely blend into their surroundings. They appear ephemeral, not necessarily gendered, almost random. Photography here becomes part of being together, and the artist’s gaze raises questions about the legacy of traditional gender roles in the history of Eastern European photography.
The melancholic romanticism of Guys is further developed in the second series of photographs, Blue Flowers, featuring macro images of roses and orchids painted blue. While the male bodies in Guys are depicted as organic forms with an emphasis on their texture, the flowers resemble erotic, withering bodies. At the same time, although the enlarged images of flowers call for a closer look, they refuse to provide the visual sharpness that macro techniques promise.
Conceived as a conversation between the two series, the exhibition in Tours also includes a unique single-channel video installation, produced specially for this show. It is presented as an enclosed architectural installation that the viewer has only limited access to, and thus embodies and further expands the ideas explored in the photographic series – the frustration of an unfulfilled promise becomes an integral part of the exhibition as a whole.
As the first exhibition in France devoted to this contemporary Lithuanian artist, the show introduces the public to her works that take a gentle look at the fragility of the world and question cultural, aesthetic and social heritage through photography.
Gerda Paliušytė (b. 1987) is an artist based in Vilnius. She is interested in various documentary practices, historical and popular culture phenomena and characters, and their relationship to social reality. The artist’s films, photographs and installations often explore different forms of intimacy, as well as the magic and fragility of collective existence. The artist’s latest film is Nevermore, a documentary about the legend of the American writer Edgar Alan Poe in Baltimore (2020). Her photography projects include For Cecil (2018–2020) and Guys (2021–ongoing) and Blue Flowers (2022–ongoing), both published as books. Since 2018 Paliušytė has belonged to the artists’ collective Montos Tattoo.
Paliušytė’s recent solo and duo exhibitions include Lipstick at the project space Editorial, and We Live in Places (with Gabija Nedzinskaitė) at the former Institute of Physics, both in Vilnius. In 2020 Paliušytė was a recipient of the Rupert x Lithuanian Culture Institute x Somerset House Studios residency award.
Asta Vaičiulytė is an art curator and art publications’ editor working at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius. Among other projects she has curated and co-curated solo exhibitions by artists Jochen Lempert, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, Melanie Smith and Algimantas Kunčius. Between 2012 and 2016 she worked in a curatorial collaboration which focused on the experiential, the material and the elusive within the contemporary art field and explored non-verbal perception and ways of alternative exchange. This research has resulted in three international group exhibitions; Ritual Room (2013), Words aren’t the thing (2015) and Anachronikos (2016) at the CAC, Vilnius.
In 2017, she was a co-curator of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale presenting artist Žilvinas Landzbergas, and in 2018 of the video programme Fast forwarded. Selected Lithuanian video works since the 1990s, screened at MAXXI, the National Museum of 21st Century Arts as part of the Flux Festival of Lithuanian Arts in Rome. In 2022 Conversations about Lithuanian Contemporary Art, a book of 30 conversations she has edited, that features artists, curators, art critics and other cultural agents that have been contributing to the Lithuanian contemporary art field over the past 30 years, was published by the CAC, Vilnius.
The exhibition is part of the Lithuanian season in France 2024. The Season is organized by the Lithuanian culture Institute and the French Institute in Paris.
Image: Gerda Paliušytė, Blue Flowers (2024), colour photograph