Gerda Paliušytė’s first exhibition in France, You Look at Me, presents two of her photographic series – Guys (since 2021) and Blue Flowers (since 2022), created and always shown as a unified work. Fragmented nude male bodies that almost blend into their surroundings are placed in distant dialogue with macro images of flowers, painted blue for a stronger aesthetic appeal. The forms and textures of these human and plant bodies blend eroticism and abstraction, flirting with the possibility of misrecognition, inviting and at the same time refusing proximity. Conventional genres – nudes and flowers – here are twisted and act as a decoy, questioning the canon of representation: feminine and masculine themes and objects of attention, their dependence on external socio-political circumstances, as well as tradition. In Guys, the relationship between the photographer and the photographed is left open, and instead of a voyeuristic contemplation nudity becomes part of an intimate presence together with the subject; while enlarged images of the Blue Flowers withhold the expectation of a macro-technique – their blurred colours and edges refuse a perfectly sharp look.
You Look at Me exposes one’s gaze and makes one conscious of it. The single-channel video installation, enclosed in one of the exhibition rooms, physically embodies the limits of proximity explored in the photographic series. The desire for more and the disappointment of an unfulfilled promise are recurring subjects in this exhibition. The photographs do not deliver what one expects of the genre in the same way that an artificially-dyed flower fails to keep its fabricated colour – fading and turning white again, thus transforming itself. Instead of a fulfilment, the temporality and spectrality of these human and non-human bodies and our relationship to them are emphasised, inviting a gentler look at our coexistence.
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 organised by the Jeu de Paume, Paris and the Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, in collaboration with the City of Tours, and presented at the Château de Tours in Tours. It is part of the Lithuanian season in France 2024, organized by the Lithuanian culture Institute and the French Institute in Paris.
Image: Gerda Paliušytė, Blue Flowers (2024), colour photograph