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Elena GaputytĖ
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- Dr. Laima Laučkaitė
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- The Lithuanian artist Elena Gaputytė worked as an émigré;
her chosen second homeland was the United Kingdom. Born in
1927, in the village of Drąseikiai in the Joniškis district (Lithuania),
she studied at the Joniškis Gymnasium (Lithuanian secondary
school). Gaputyte spent her childhood in a traditional peasant
environment, which provided her with a lifelong spiritual
guideline and orientation and remained in her memory as the
Promised Land. World War II, however, took it all away and
brought with it the loss of Lithuanian independence under Nazi
and prolonged Soviet occupation, and the concomitant guerrilla
war and exiles to Siberia. Towards the end of the war in 1944,
Gaputyte escaped from the Soviet occupation to Germany. She
studied in Freiburg – at Ludwig University and L’École des
Arts et Métiers; later she crossed the Atlantic to Canada,
where she studied at the School of the Art Museum of Montreal,
and Ontario Art College, Toronto. Nevertheless, Europe
attracted her, so she moved to Paris between 1953 and 1955 to
study at L’École des Beaux Arts under the sculptors Marcel
Gimond and Constantin Brancusi. In 1956, she moved to St. Ives
in England and then in 1964 to London to teach sculpture at
Digby Stuart College (University of London). In the period she
worked in bronze, terracotta and alabaster and participated
regularly in exhibitions.
In 1975, while on a traineeship programme at the Chelsea
School of Art, London, her practice underwent a major
transformation. It was at that moment she created The
Calendar of My Childhood – a minimalist wooden rectangle
with changeable blocks supplemented with real symbolical
elements: apples, ash or soil. This was a sculpture in
continuum – a new non-traditional type of art that
changed in time. In 1981, Gaputytė made The Lord’s Prayer
– she arranged marble stones found in the islands of the
Aegean Sea in a circle, in which each stone signified the
words of The Lord’s Prayer she learned as a child. The
artist would travel with this installation and exhibit it in
different environments: for instance, on the harmonious shores
of the Aegean Sea in Greece or at the Berlin Wall that divided
Europe into its two hostile camps. Gaputyte chose to work with
non-traditional materials associated with land art and the
primary elements; many of her installations included firelight.
She used to arrange burning bowls and candles in various
configurations to create an emotionally suggestive field. The
majority of Gaputytė’s installations with fire commemorated
World War II, including: Peace Lights (LYC Museum and
Art Gallery, Cumbria, 1981); Silent Witness at the
Anhalter railway station in West Berlin, 1984 – 85;
Memories of War in Albion Studios, London, 1985; A
Prophesy: After 50 Years (The Richard Demarco Gallery,
Edinburgh, 1989). The subject of war became central in the
artist’s work; her personal tragedy, the loss of her loved
ones and her homeland was representative of the memory of all
the dead, disabled people who lost their homes and faith.
- In 1989, a manuscript found its way into Gaputytė’s hands
that inspired her to create a new work. These were the memoirs
of the deportee Dalia Grinkevičiūtė: Lithuanians by the
Laptev Sea – a moderate, but shocking story about the
Soviet deportations, suffering, and the inhumanity of life and
death in the Gulag. Gaputytė produced the installation
Beyond the Arctic Circle – in memory of the victims of
Trofimovsk, shown in the British exhibition Passages,
held in 1990 in Kaiserslautern (Germany). The minimalist
installation consists of wooden cones – their blinding
whiteness, sharp peaks and the painful rhythm are reminiscent
of the Arctic Circle. While people in the West knew what World
War II was, but they had little imagination of what happened
in Lithuania during and after it. As the celebrations and
discourse surrounding 60th anniversary of the cessation of the
war has shown this year, westerners still do not understand
that the war did not end in Lithuania (and ‘Eastern Europe’)
in 1945. Gaputytė, however, produced her installations as a
testament and witnessing was her avowed mission as an artist
to which end she experimented with a serious subject combined
with archaic semantics. She decided to publish Grinkevičiūtė’s
memoirs in a new edition illustrated with her installations.
She gave the book a symbolical title: Reconciliation,
emphasising the Christian meaning of reconciliation and
forgiveness. The book should have been published in 1991, to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of the deportations, but the
artist did not live to see it published – dying in 1991, in
London. Her friends realised her vision in 2001 by publishing
it as a limited edition artist’s book. The publication
presents the Golgotha of the Lithuanian Gulag in English and
Lithuanian and at the same time represents Gaputytė’s art and
life.
- This retrospective of Elena Gaputytė organised by the
Lithuanian Art Museum is the first major survey of her
installations in Lithuania – unique not only in this context,
but also in terms of the art of Lithuanian emigrants.
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