Goda Lukaitė “Portal” • Verpėjos

Exhibition opening 2023 05 20, 15 pm.

The Marcinkonys Station Gallery is located at the last stop of the Vilnius-Marcinkonys railway line and has been curated by the independent art initiative “Verpejos” since 2019.

The idea “Express: back to nature”, which was proposed during the 2020 Vilnius competition “Let’s design our own train of the future”, won and was realised on one of the train carriages.

These are two local points – railway stations in different towns and villages. The painted carriage of the old train connects with the exhibition in the Marcinkonys Station Gallery. In this way, the two stations pulsating with art create an allusion to a tunnel, like an invisible art thread. The strongest merger of the stations will take place on 16 June in Vilnius during the Culture Night festival. That evening, the carriage will open its doors and become an exhibition space, where an installation of three-dimensional paintings will be on show.

The main motifs of my paintings are: nature, spaces, time, psychological observations. I create exhibitions as a separate work of art, using complementary objects as a link between nature and painting.

With the creation of this two-part exhibition, I continue to develop the theme of nature’s impact on man, and by creating deconstructed landscapes I continue my search for the image of tranquillity in the form of Gammaphoras (images of nature with hidden allusions and metaphors to psychological experiences). The train journey, which helps us to reach both points of the exhibition, becomes a metaphor for the themes of my work. The journey – as a source of visual inspiration, and an inner journey towards self-knowledge.

Just as in my paintings, whose titles contain references to time, date and coordinates, these two places become the points of the individual artworks, separated from each other only by a train journey. It is also personal that the motif of the train and the tracks is symbolic in my work, recurring and recurring. And a large part of the latest paintings were created after spending time in the forests of Dzūkija.

Goda Lukaitė (b. 1990) is a painter of the younger generation. She studied at the Justinas Vienožinskis Art School in Vilnius, and graduated from the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a master’s degree in fresco-mosaic. She has held several solo exhibitions. The most important of them are “My Inner City” at the Pamėnkalnis Gallery, “All Other Places” at the Vilnius Children and Youth Art Gallery. Since 2017 – member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Union, winner of the Young Painters’ Audience Prize 2015, one of the participants of the Painting Routers 2018. She has been actively participating in exhibitions and various projects since 2013. She has been working at the Vilnius Children and Youth Art School since 2019. Her main motives: forgotten, unoccupied places, spaces.

Organiser: VšĮ Verpėjos

Partner: Merkinės fabrikas

Supported by Lithuanian Council for Culture, EEA grants.

The exhibition will run until June 18, 2023 at Marcinkonys Station gallery (Kastinio g. 1C, Marcinkonys).

Marcinkonys Station gallery is open Saturdays and Sundays, noon–5 pm.

Exhibition opening. Photo credits: Jorė Janavičiūtė