23/07/2018 Severine Grosjean
Aukse Miliukaite is a young Lithuanian painter recently graduated from Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is a young artist with a strong style exploring the history of art in her paintings.
In her work, she makes use of historical paintings of Grands Maitres such as Paul Gauguin, Paul Cézanne and other artists. She appropriates the works consciously and with a strategic reflection. She manipulates the size, the color or the subject of her work by re-using elements of archives or personal photographs which she integrates into her pictorial compositions. Her painting is characterized by an expressive composition of bright color combinations, blending simple forms and moments stolen from daily life, sometimes ironic, with a very cinematographic framing.
She has a conceptual approach of borrowing, appropriation and recontextualization. She reproduces, replaces and transforms as a sort of recycling of values established by artistic institutions. She does not oppose a rejection of the art that precedes it but rather a constant dialogue with it. She “eats” bulimically from her masters and uses her occupation as an image collector by injecting it into her own work in the form of references and a new contextualization. She intends to loot in the works of the past but to go forward. Diversion is to lose the original meaning and give it a new one.
Appropriation practices have become commonplace in art. These cultural diversions constitute an artistic reference itself. To divert it leads to live another life with the work. From then on, she gives a story to each chosen artistic reference, studied and modified as a sort of meta-narrative transforming itself at each work.
Aukse Miliukaite reaffirms the singularity and uniqueness of each “copied” work. What is interesting in this process is that it allows to understand what connects a work of art to reality (the reality can be considered as another work of art). In multicolored works, Aukse Miliukaite adds elements of contemporary culture. She superimposes different historical periods and builds new stories.
The reproducibility, the multiplicity of media layers under which the work rests, problematizes the question of its artistic value as a work, its legitimacy as a cultural reference with regard to history. By this act of appropriation, Aukse erases the frontiers of art. Appropriation is not limited to the strict appropriation of earlier works of art chosen for their emblematic character in the history of art. It designates whose works are duplicated or transformed by the mass media. By constructing unexpected visual situations, she encourages viewers to reflect on the traditional rules of a work and to distance themselves from images that seem to have been memorized.
Partnership: The Nomad Creative Projects
