If this exposition were to be described in professional terms, it would undoubtedly be a retrospective exhibition revealing a ten-year stretch of Inga Mrazauskaitė’s creative path.
However, feeling the variations and evolution of the author’s aesthetics, motifs, and themes, we are also enveloped in a certain holistic sense. Everything is one, there is no beginning and no end. Therefore, Inga, who has distinguished four stages in her work, nevertheless finds a common denominator among all her paintings, a journey towards the fundamental question of her work, her mission. This is a search for identity that took place in the following stages:
“Earth and space/home.” For Inga, home is both the Earth and the cosmic expanse. For her, faith and science are not oppositions but two complementary approaches to understanding the surrounding environment. She explores the stars both through a telescope and through the symbols of the mythological worldview.
“Flesh and blood/transformations.” Being able to represent the body with absolute anatomical correctness, Inga does not stop there – she goes a step further. The body on her canvas becomes a sign, an allegory. It is never a concrete story. It is more of a sensation, an intimate and intuitive visual conversation about what is common to all of us. About flesh and blood. And the collective subconscious that lies within it.
“Inner dialogues/searches.” It is the collective subconscious, of which we are all part, that encodes in us some inexplicable attraction and affection for Baltic artifacts. Everyone, in discussion with oneself, discovers a completely different way to connect with the wisdom of the ancestors, to become an echo of their experience.
“Identity/home.” So we come back home. And our home is wherever we are. Because through the stars and the trees (feeling the connection with nature), through the codes woven in our grandmothers’ tablecloths (feeling the connection with the past), we find harmony, we find home within ourselves.
The cyclical flow of time in Inga’s work appears spontaneously and organically. It is not a strategic decision; it is not an illustration of confessed ideas. Slowly, after a creative lull, Inga returned to spatial canvases and the vastness of aesthetic silence.
But the rigid line of the horizon is fading, and the walls, the opaque windows, and the impassable door thresholds are disappearing. Empiricism and philosophical ideas are linked by a red thread, ants running everywhere without major obstacles. The surreal ants are explorers, the first to enter the metaphysical world. They are, perhaps, the heralds of the courage to acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge.
Those scurrying ants are also chills when music and visual arts merge in an inseparable synthesis when creative souls meet and inspire each other. This is how, I can assure you, this exhibition was born.
Art critic Austėja Mikuckytė-Mateikienė
