Galeria Leme is proud to announce Works on Paper, the third solo show by Lithuanian artist, Zilvinas Kempinas in its space. The show presents never seen before works by the artist, collecting more than forty drawings and one installation piece. The opening will take place Thursday, September 29, from 7 pm to 10 pm, and the exhibition will be on show until November 12, 2022.
BC Drawings is a series of works on paper, made by water, ink, acrylic, and by using a ball chain as a drawing tool. The technique enables gravity and kinetic inertia of metal chain to be used for lines, marks and shapes of extremely dynamic nature. Each drawing is the result of attentive listening to the materiality and fate, allowing external forces to guide the process. Triggered by the war in Ukraine, they are impulse drawings of an emotional state of a single day, like an electric discharge, which leaves a trace, a record, a mark. The nuances of watery paint resemble sumiês, insinuating forests and natural elements covered by mist. We enter this mysterious and unknown environment cautiously: some forms evolve seemingly from nowhere, while others are fading, breaking and shattering on sight, the deeper we go. Some drawings allow us to encounter spaces of silence. Others look like explosions or a wild fire. Idiosyncratic by nature, they seem to overlap and extend each other as you walk by, like stills of the same film.
The drawings have been installed in two monumental rows, one above another, which provides unconventional physical connection to a viewer, where lower row appears below eye level and the second row extends above human height.
In the middle of the back wall of the gallery, propelled by strong currents of wind under a large industrial fan, two blank sheets of watercolor paper are spinning madly, framed by deep black background. Sometimes they seem to be moving along like if they are dancing, sometimes spinning and fighting, and occasionally hitting each other with a loud violent sound. Their rectangle shapes slip in and out of the light above, casting shadows on the floor as if it’s all happening on a stage of a theatrical performance. Their movements are unpredictable, scrambled by turbulences, but their strings always untangle, and the fight seems to go on forever.
WATCH THE ARTIST’S CREATIVE PROCESS
