February 3-26, 2023
Solo show by an artist Birutė Nomeda Stankūnienė will be held at ‘Florence Art Deposit’, Florence
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The Metaphysics of Femininity.
Is femininity a challenge?
The role of a creative woman is discussed, analyzed, and compared… The names of female creators and their works are pulled from the historical shadow.
I will use the expression – “on the wave”. And this would mean one thing – the topic is interesting for culture specialists and curious viewers. Indirectly and secondly – fashionable, the definition is quite trivial, art historians avoid studying this socio-cultural phenomenon and juxtaposing it with other processes taking place in the art arena. I also appreciate another, categorical point of view, that dividing artists according to gender is simply unprofessional and conjunctural. But I cannot disagree with the insights that the role of women in art was also artificially belittled due to the attitude formed by the socio-political environment, which, like a brick wall, has only recently begun to be demolished. The world of female creativity began to open up behind her. What makes it different and special?
In the work of Birutė Nomeda Stankūnienė, the theme of femininity sparked in the background of other, mostly natural abstract impressions, but was not represented in detail. The artist was gathering like the clouds of the autumn sky to finally burst with all the violence and develop the theme to the end. In the whole feminist context, she is not a militant, protesting, shocking creator, she does not care about male dominance in art. Birutė’s analysis of femininity in painting is a complete contrast to the Guerrilla movement of artists that was established in New York in 1985. For the creative practice of Girls or the Lithuanian Cooltourists. Stankūnienės Womenhood/(Essere Dona((Being a woman) The gender philosophy of the French writer Simone de Beauvoir is much closer to femininity. Experiences of being “in the shoes of a woman”) are important for painters: feeling existential anxiety, emptiness, loneliness. The artist in the series of works “Women” in a consistent, abstract form, using colour, stroke and what surrounds us in everyday life, simple household materials: corrugated cardboard, kitchen paper towels, cellophane for flowers, foil for baking, construction rubeirod, “tells” about the transformation into a woman, what sensations the female body experiences after the first menstruation, fertility and during periods of motherhood and when the inner emptiness opens up, but at the same time the realization that loneliness in life is not evil, but a new, different quality, that one can achieve creative fulfilment and that, perhaps, soul-filling joy , but it is the colour of both fullness and stability…
The artist represents the biological differences of the female body abstractly, using color, textures and strokes. Deliberately not depicting a woman’s body, Birutė Nomeda Stankūnienė conveys in an abstract form the threat to youth, relationships, feelings, and its end, … The artist herself admits: “The theme of my womanhood is rough and direct. Those who expect that I will like or please them will be disappointed. The pink colour here is deceiving, it is only a hint and so fleeting. It is more important for me to “talk out”, to try to get rid of the creeping inner chaos, the mother’s dislike experienced in childhood, threats even to material well-being. Sometimes I think – I became like crazy to spill,
Indeed, looking at the work of Birutė Nomeda Stankūnienė, you see a woman-creator trying to understand her identity over time, pondering what experience gave her and what she took away forever…
The artist does not strive to get the status of a creator-feminist, she simply speaks sincerely about the role “imposed” on women by society, about personal experiences and obstacles to paint, she is no longer afraid to search with the means of painting what a woman feels in the face of life’s crises.
The question: of whether femininity is a challenge will remain directly unanswered, and whether an answer is needed at all…
Art critic Jolita Mieželaitienė
