Eglė Ridikaitė. Between

7 June – 29 September 2024

Since 24 February 2022, with Russia having launched large-scale military action against Ukraine and the world order which was supposed to guarantee us all security, peace, and prosperity for years, being in turmoil, the proximity of war in our neighboring country has become a psychological challenge for many Lithuanian people. For some, it has been also a painful emotional flashback to the traumatic experiences of the Soviet era.  

 

Eglė Ridikaitė’s „Between“ series of works, born during the war in Ukraine and continuously expanding, deals with the emotional and psychological states, reflections, and personal experiences caused by this event. Light is the main protagonist of this series of artworks. In the artist’s latest works, light takes on a double meaning: it creates an illusory hope that nothing has changed, but at the same time conveys the painful realization that this is all that is left of the shattered world. The light here exists only on the outside, behind the securely drawn curtains, only through the crack in the neck of a crushed plastic bottle found in the fragments of war, like a binocular turned upside down, distancing us from the ordinary. It is somewhere on the other side: visible but inaccessible. It is creating a memory of a once peaceful, reliable, familiar world. The paintings, which at first glance convey a positive, playful, even dreamy everyday atmosphere, are filled with a seemingly palpable tension, stagnation, fear, and retreat into the depths of the room, into one’s own inner world. It is a state between past and present time, between calm, security, and anxious uncertainty and fear. This duality creates the mood of a surrealistic horror dream and has a direct effect on the viewer’s subconscious.  

 

The artworks of the series „Between“ are a diary of a foreign and, at the same time, our own war, which we are unwillingly fighting in our minds and souls. A record of the in-between state of constant tension and inner turmoil. Ridikaitė writes it in her own way: using the graffiti technique, which is so in tune with the barricades of the Ukrainian war and the open walls of blown-up houses, where remnants of the former life are still visible. 

Algė Gudaitytė, art critic and curator 

 

Curator: Algė Gudaitytė 

Coordinator: Aurelija Malinauskaitė 

Designer: Loreta Uzdraitė 
Supported by Neringa Municipality 

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