Lietuviškas nonkonformizmas "realizmo be krantų" epochoje : Vinco Kisarausko kūryba

ENThe article aims to describe the nonconformist body of work by Vincas Kisarauskas and to answer the following questions: What may be called “nonconformist practice” and why it was so rare? Why the oeuvre of Kisarauskas, despite its potential to change the artistic thinking, had any palpable impact neither on its soviet contemporaries, nor on the younger generation of artists? The article analyses the entire oeuvre of Kisarauskas and the response to it, highlighting which part of his body of work was shown publicly and when, and what remained in his private space and for what reasons. Kisarauskas’ artworks, seen throughout official exhibitions in the 1960s, exhibited traits of Italian neorealism, the impact of Lithuanian folk sculpture, symbolism, references to German expressionism, and later on - the principles of abstract painting to the extent tolerated in the framework of soviet modernism. His experiments became rather problematic, when it came to undesirable subjects and to the constructivist strategy of painting, reaching beyond the tolerable modernism and questioning the notion of art perse. Kisarauskas’ prints from the 1960s at times explore subjects unacceptable to the soviet ideology (the Resistance, religious motifs), and the entire range of his characters does not coincide with the model of a soviet man.The artist’s inner censor has expelled all these issues to the margins of his oeuvre, or to “secondary” works. In his private inquiries into painting from c. 1965 one can notice an analytic relation to constructivist painting by Vytautas Kairiūkštis and Polish avant-garde of the early 10th century. A comprehensive knowledge of Polish art scene becomes for Kisarauskas a basis, on which he creates an alternative discourse of modernist painting both in his artistic and theoretical practice - art critical texts on emerging constructivist and conceptual tendencies in painting. With his 1970s version of modernism based on constructivism Kisarauskas becomes a part of European culture, due to the evident analogy to the phenomenon of “new realism” in Central Europe. Paintings and prints, which during Soviet times have not been shown publicly, were known only to the closest circle of the artist’s friends. Their poor circulation may also have been due to the fact that there was no intellectually adequate sphere for their reception. One finds more experiments, which challenge the artistic thinking and the notion of art, and eliminate the border between art and life, not in Kisarauskas’ painting and prints, but in his “secondary” works: theatre scenography, artist books, some of his illustration series, and collages. A characteristic trait of these works is self-reflexivity that emerges from the artist’s conceptual relation to reality. [From the publication]