Marija Olšauskaitė. The Softest Hard

October 25, 2024 – March 23, 2025

PlakatasCarré d’Art–Musée d’art contemporain 

Place de la Maison Carrée. 30000 Nîmes, France 

Tel: +33 (0)4 66 76 35 70

 

From October 25, 2024 to March 23, 2025, and as part of the 2024 Lithuanian Season in France, Carré d’Art – Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes presents The Softest Hard by artist Marija Olšauskaitė (b. 1989, Vilnius). Several works, including some in glass, will be on display in the Project Room on the 2ndfloor of Carré d’Art, an oscillation between the traditions of craft and ornament and the social role of sculpture. Marija Olšauskaitė uses a variety of collaborative modes and explores themes of relationships, openness, intimacy and belonging. This exhibition focuses on her long affinity with glass. She creates forms that always seem to be in a state of transformation, using both conventional and more contemporary materials suchas silicone.

 

In many of her works, there is a direct reference to Lithuania’s once flourishing glass production. The artist continues to work with glassmakers from companies that are still active. She recovered colored glass plates from the Raudonoji Ausra company, which was active until the 1990s and used to make stained glass. Workers at times had smuggled them out of the factory, enabling her to obtain and collect them as well as give them a new lease of life. They are featured in the series of glass folding screens Never Act in Haste.

 

Marija Olšauskaitė’s sculptures seem to have a life of their own, passing through analchemical process from liquid to solid state. These forms, which can sometimes seem to come straight from the future, are objects that question the sensations we can feel in front of them, and force us to think about how we share them. As she puts it, all the objects in the exhibition are twins, brothers or sisters in a family dynamic. They are in dialogue with each other.Presented at the same time as the Aleksandra Kasuba exhibition, Marija Olšauskaitė’s works continue the ideas of her elder, who conceived architecture as a means of thinking about and reinventing human relationships, affirming the social role of architecture and art.

 

About Carré d’Art

Inaugurated in 1993, the opening of Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes is a successful example of the opening up to contemporary art and the policy of decentralisation undertaken in France from the 1980s onwards. Situated between the CAPC in Bordeaux and the Abattoirs in Toulouse to the west, and the MAC in Marseille and the MAMAC in Nice to the east, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nîmes is a link in a chain that has been completed over the years with a view to promoting and disseminating contemporary art in the Mediterranean region.Like its Parisian model, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Carré d’Art houses the media libraryand the museum of contemporary art, offering Nîmes residents and visitors from abroad a new place to live. It was in 1983 that Jean Bousquet, newly elected Mayor of Nîmes, confirmed his plans to raise the city’s cultural profile around the major project of creating this new institution.Begun in 1986, with considerable help from the Direction des Musées de France, the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art now comprises almost 600 works.

 

 

Exhibition curator Jean-Marc Prevost

Organisers: Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Carré d’Art-Musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes

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Lithuanian Season in France is implemented by the Lithuanian Cultural Institute and the French Institute of Culture. 

Other exhibitions and events of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in the programme of the Lithuanian season in France 2024 and during the season in France: 

See also

Gallery