… suddenly a boring room became magical …
Zilvinas Kempinas
The works of Zilvinas Kempinas, who counts among the up-and-coming young artists on the international scene, possess a fascinating lightness and poetry. As a showcase of sensory abstractions, the exhibition presents the mystery of fleeting phenomena and invisible forces: the rotation of wind, shadow as an ornament, the play of reflected light. Minimal means are used to achieve maximum effects: lengths of unspooled videotape moving in currents of air serve as a sculptural material, transforming architecture into an optically buzzing environment or staging a hypnotic play of lines. They become a hall of columns or an abstract cinema, a dance of ribbons, or a sheet across the ceiling that evokes sensations of being underwater. These almost immaterial installations set the museum’s white cube in motion: architectural mass dissolves, the space is charged with energetic freshness, sensory awareness is thrown off balance. Art as flickering, vibrating, hovering, that enchants the eye and makes us dizzy.
Zilvinas Kempinas, born in 1969 in Plunge, Lithuania, lives and works in New York. He will represent Lithuania at the Venice Biennial in 2009.
The exhibition was supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania.
Curator: Gerald Matt
Guided tours: every Sunday 4 pm