“Klaipėda will receive a selected exhibition by the master printmakers of Western Europe. The prints from the rich and treasured collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, works by Canaletto, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and other world- famous artists invite to take a fresh look at natural, urban, and symbolical landscapes, to turn our gaze from mundanity and to contemplate these imaginary views and the discoveries of the world of art,” Dr Arūnas Gelūnas, director general of the LNMA says.
Nature as a backdrop and the main protagonist
According to the curators of the Landscape in Focus, natural motifs that proliferated in the Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages, were a backdrop or a setting for the events and scenes depicted in a work of art. The periods of Baroque, Neoclassicism and Romanticism were marked by active ways of discovering the world – and the landscape – pilgrimages, travel and study. With time, landscape in art took on diversity of form: from realistic to symbolic, from idealized to visionary.
This important tendency is the principle organizing the exhibits of the Landscape in Focus into a coherent story. The 16th-to-19th-century prints embrace the diversity of terrain types and views of nature – from neat small–scale compositions to gigantic panoramas, from a short moment in the life of a plant to majestic visions of eternity. According to the curators, Liškevičienė and Mažeikienė, this alternating close to remote focus reveals ever new aspects of the theme.
The exhibition is structured around four thematic blocks: The Landscape of Symbols, The Attentive Gaze: A Window to Nature, The Longing for Landscape, and The Urban Landscape: From Topography to a Vision. They introduce different representations of the landscape in the prints by the old masters. The artists on display are the renowned printmakers of the Low Countries, Germany, Italy and France (Claude Lorrain, Gaspard Poussin, Giovanni Battista Piranesi or Canaletto) whose popular and sought-after editions of prints entered the collections of libraries and print rooms.
Nature has been one of the main subjects of exploration by art and science during all times, this attention assumes even higher relevance in the contemporary world where human activity keeps changing – irreversibly – the surrounding landscape. Thus, the exhibition Landscape in Focus not only introduces the artwork from the old European masters, but reminds of human approach to their surrounding nature in the past centuries.
Curators: Jolita Liškevičienė, Ilona Mažeikienė
Coordinator Aurelija Malinauskaitė
Architect Jurgis Dagelis
Designer Marius Žalneravičius
