Kasuba and Olšauskaitė, from ornament to design

Nîmes,

Within the framework of the project’s cultural program Lithuania in Francetwo monographic exhibitions dedicated to artists from the Baltic country can be seen at the Carré d’Art in Nimes: the first, Aleksandra Kasuba (1923-2019), walked the borders between design, architecture and experimental art and this French exhibition , titled “Imagine le futur”, will be its first wide presentation in Europe; the second, Marija Olšauskaitė, born 35 years ago in Vilnius, displays “The Softest Hard” in the project room of that center: several glass works in which she has sought to reflect on the validity of artisanal tradition and ornament and on the possible social role of sculpture.

Kasuba, whose retrospective has been conceived as a luminous recital on the future possibilities that losses allow and the options that turbulent times do not erase, fled his country after World War II and the Nazi and Soviet occupations, and emigrated to United States, together with her sculptor husband, after some years in a German displaced persons camp. It would be in 1963 when, established in New York, she undertook the creation of very visionary spatial environments made from stretched fabrics; He wanted to represent in them imaginary and timeless locations where wandering souls could live and in which there were no rigid right angles.

These shelters, which acquire a very different meaning from the knowledge of his biography and which have come to be exhibited in public environments, testify to his desire to harmonize the coexistence of the individual, nature and technology; All the pieces that are part of the assembly and their documentation were donated by the artist to the National Museum of Art of Lithuania in the period between 2014 and 2019; In the case of documents, the originals are kept at the Smithsonian in Washington. The exhibition is completed with works donated for the occasion by the artist – perfumer Danutė Pajaujis Anonis, the actress and filmmaker Pola Chapelle, the Fluxus creator George Maciunas and the film director Jonas Mekas, who were his friends.

Aleksandra Kasuba. Shell Dwellers, IV, 1989. The Lithuanian National Museum of Art

As for Marija Olšauskaitė, who continues to reside in Vilnius, she has based her work on the investigation of issues linked to human relationships (belonging, intimacy, the need for openness) and her processes are often collaborative. This exhibition in Provence has wanted to dwell on his love, since the beginning of his career, for glass: he creates forms that seem to be in a continuous state of transformation, in that material and in other more conventional or contemporary ones, such as silicone.

In Nimes we will see glass screens in which we can detect references both to domestic spaces, and what can or cannot be made visible in them, and to the fragility of human ties; The sculptures of the series also stand out Pondshorizontal and in large format, similar to translucent and luminous blocks of ice, since they suggest new paths of relationship between form and function, since their design makes them unusable, purely enigmatic objects.

Its production generally refers to the good times that glassmaking is experiencing in his country: Olšauskaitė continues to work with craftsmen and companies that are still active, and in the beginning he recovered colored plates from the Raudonoji Ausra firm, which closed in the nineties, used to generate stained glass windows; The workers had clandestinely extracted them from the factory, which allowed him to acquire them and give them new lives. These pieces are currently part of his series Never Act in Haste.

Tremendously peculiar, his works seem to enjoy a life of their own, to be immersed in an alchemical process, halfway between the liquid and solid state, open to chance in the transition. Their forms could come from the future and do not offer us given interpretations, even though they establish relationships with each other: in the montage they have twin or sister creations between whom family dynamics are established.

Both Kasuba and Olšauskaitė have ultimately sought to rethink, whether from fabric or glass, space or form, more fruitful modes of relationship and the social role of creation.