Valentinas Antanavičius is by far the most consistent nonconformist of his generation. Active since the middle of the 1960s, he had been working in the periphery of the official art life until the Perestroika period. Major group exhibitions of the Soviet time featured almost solely his portrait paintings, while the essential part of Antanavičius’ creative work – compositions of critical social and political metaphors conveyed through distinctive iconography – was virtually absent from the exhibition spaces. It was only in 1986, when the artist turned fifty, that he could show these works too in his solo exhibition, organised in Vilnius’ most prominent art space – the Art Exhibition Hall. When Lithuania regained independence, Antanavičius was honoured with a National Culture and Art Award for his nonconformist contribution to Lithuanian art.
Features of Expressionism, Surrealism, Dadaism, Pop Art and Lithuanian ethnographic art can be traced in Antanavičius’ work. Fairly early, he got introduced to the work of several Polish artists: assemblages of Tadeusz Kantor and Władysław Hasior, and theatre plays of stage director and set designer Józef Szajna. These famous three’s theatrical practice of using found objects (properties) and endowing them with symbolic meanings felt close to Antanavičius. Kantor’s “degraded reality” – the dump of society and shabby everyday use objects of the so-called lowest rank – looked not so ascetic in Antanavičius’ assemblages. The latter appeared to prefer Hasior’s dense and colourful accumulation of second-hand objects. From all these influences, Antanavičius ultimately created his own blend, shaped by an original iconography that was informed by his personal experience and that of the country’s recent history.
Allegorical figurative compositions, painted on canvas and cardboard or assembled using found objects, comprise an important part of Antanavičius’ oeuvre. The central theme of his painting is the intimidating, crippling force of totalitarianism. The viewer’s attention is directed to single or grouped deformed human figures, while the conditional background resembles an empty stage or its curtain with a sketchy landscape or urban scenery painted on it.
The essential recurring motif of these paintings is the bloodstained or burnt wounded human body. In some compositions, it is transformed into bird and animal shapes or turned into fragments of sculptural monuments. Both the contrast of rich colours and the expression of the stroke and dark shade are important in Antanavičius’ work. Another large group of works related to the paintings are his assemblages. The experience of totalitarianism continues to take central place in these pieces as well, yet it is now treated sarcastically rather than dramatically. The artist’s assemblages are concerned with the plastic image of the authorities’ insignia and waste products of everyday life. In order to create political and social allegories, Antanavičius employs various found objects, most often second-hand, broken down, disintegrated belongings, mechanisms and toys. These are assembled in figurative compositions or ones at least alluding to anthropomorphism, and sometimes combined with painted fragments.
Another important series of the artist’s assemblages consists of compositions with ethnographic artefacts: domestic utensils, textile patches, Palm Sunday bunches and Pancake Day masks. The “eloquence” of the found objects themselves is the most important aspect of these works. Yet they are rarely used unaltered; most often, the artist assembles them into archetypal figurative compositions.
No major turning point occurred in Antanavičius’ work after the 1990s, yet the range of his subject matter became wider. Alongside political and social metaphors, the artist now also creates compositions with Christian or literary themes. Besides painting and assemblage, he has also been working in graphics and scenography.
Raminta Jurėnaitė