Elena Grudzinskaitė. Mono-tik

On October 28 – November 15, 2023 Vilnius Graphic Art Centre presents Elena Grudzinskaitė’s solo exhibition “Mono-tik” at the Gothenburg gallery “Grafik i Väst”. The exhibition will also include the launch of a catalogue published especially for this project (designer Agnė Dautartaitė-Krutulė).

On October 27 during the “Culture Night” Elena Grudzinskaitė will hold a paper lithography workshop. The opening will be held on Saturday, 28 October, 12-16 pm. 

Elena Grudzinskaitė’s exhibition “Mono-tik” at the Gothenburg Grafik i Väst gallery represents contemporary Lithuanian graphic art and celebrates the longstanding collaboration between Lithuanian and Swedish graphic art institutions and artists. Since the year 1990, exhibitions of Lithuanian and Swedish graphic art, various educational events, and lectures were hosted by both countries. Over the more than 30 years of collaboration, both countries’ art institutions and artists played an important role. 

The works presented in the exhibition – the kinetic object “Mono-tik” (2021-2023) and the photopolymer engraving series “Cutouts” (2022-2023) – are an inquiry into the notion of routine monotonous landscape. They explore the broadest, fundamental sense of landscape, and ponder how fragments of fleeting situations and their consequences, quite distant from the habitual understanding of landscape, can effectively become it.

In “Mono-tik”, the source of images is a one-year period from the author’s own life. She spontaneously took photographs of the surrounding scenery every day, constantly filling the photo gallery of her smartphone, and eventually generated an expanded visual landscape based solely on the content of this gallery, capturing it in time and space. The photopolymer engraving series “Cutouts” is based on the material of the “Mono-tik” object. Here, the author employs the pre-generated fragment collage, extracts random visual situations from it, and arranges them into transformed reality compositions. Both works presented in the exhibition are expressions of the artist’s need to comprehend her own environment and states of mind, to be in one almost static routine point, and a synthesised apparition of the immediate surroundings; an expanded landscape absorbing the flow of time, events, and happenings. 

Elena Grudzinskaitė (b. 1987) graduated with an MA in Graphic Art from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2012, and has been teaching at the VAA Department of Graphic Art from 2015. She has held 8 solo shows since 2010, and actively participates in local and international exhibitions and symposia of graphic and interdisciplinary art, in addition to initiating graphic art outreach projects and curating exhibitions. Elena lives and works in Vilnius. Her preferred techniques include drypoint, photopolymer, and photographic etching. In her artistic practice, the artis analyses individuals’ relationship with their surrounding, the liminality and fragility of the parameters of space and time, the human impact on the environment, as well as the levitation of the notion of landscape between culture and nature, reality and fiction. Elena’s works often assume the shape of a transformed, synthesised landscape.