Looking at the Landscape…

In paintings from different periods of Adomas Galdikas’ work, we see what is usually invisible to the eye – the inner rhythms of nature and the artist’s spiritual experiences. In his landscapes, secondary and often overlooked figures also come to life. We see playful, lyrical girls and mysterious, melancholic female gazes reminiscent of folk art sculptures – reflections of the national values of that time. In the exhibition, special attention is drawn to the piercing gaze of Baruch, a Jewish contemporary of Galdikas, in the urban landscape of Kaunas streets – Portrait of the Jew Baruch. The painting subtly alludes to the Baroque period and the enigmatic works of Diego Velázquez.

Galdikas’ early work was shaped by the World of Art movement that dominated during his studies in Saint Petersburg – combining realist and symbolist tendencies, along with Scandinavian and Russian Neo-Romantic influences. In his later paintings, influences of Western European modern movements appear – Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism and Cubism. By the mid-1930s, the artist developed his own individual style – in his vibrant oil paintings, the influence of Fauvism and the School of Paris is especially visible.

From 1946, after emigrating to Freiburg, his landscapes are marked by completely transparent flows of colour – reaching the peak of painterly expression. Between 1947 and 1952 in Paris, influenced by lyrical abstraction and later in New York, within the environment of abstract expressionism, Galdikas’ landscapes expand into abstract space.

At all stages of his work, his landscapes convey a vision of a spiritually rich Lithuania. While in exile and longing for his homeland, Galdikas portrayed nature as a kind of meta-construct. Each renewed, primordial pantheistic experience transformed every impression of nature into a living, pulsating experience of the entire cosmos – as if the artist draws us into an ecstatic dance of colour and does not let go.

Let us look slowly…