Kęstutis Zapkus | Painting, a Search for its Essence

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The exhibition presents a selection of works made between 2010-2022 representing my creative ambitions of this period. I would call this the cycle of my late painting as it continues, changes and reexamines. I believe in the special importance of the Art of Painting to history and human self-esteem.
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In visual expression complexity, cross referencing and simultaneity are very important to me intellectually and emotionally (due to childhood war experience and the complexities of thought). I see an example in the Sistine Ceiling, where a thousand faces, still lives, structures and myths create a form complex equaling a symphonic work. It is important to me that a vision carry associative and emotional material. Multiples of elements are ordered and active in my work. The inspiration is from musical composition, our world’s informational abundance and global concerns. The essential soulfulness of a work becomes the image, an underlying narrative is only secondary. That’s how my creative vision formed itself: completely abstract, complex in association, expression, representative of experience, displayed through structures of multiple details.

So given artists’ goals, what is left for a viewer to enjoy? Often, progressive ideas or evolutionary issues are not active to a viewer’s concerns. Is an artist’s attempt, with its uncertain aesthetics, frustrating to a viewer longing for familiarity?

Kes Zapkus

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Kęstutis Kes Zapkus (1938) is one of the most famous Lithuanian painters in the United States, a representative of abstractionism. Honorary professor of the Vilnius Academy of Arts (2014). In 1947, he moved to the United States of America with his mother. In 1960 he graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1963 - from Syracuse University. In 1963, he studied at the School of Fine Arts and Architecture in Paris.
In 1992 K. Zapkus came to teach at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He taught for half a year, but the created legend is still alive today. The course led by him included artists Žilvinas Kempinas, Patricija Jurkšaitytė, Aidas Bareikis. K. Zapkaus' works have traveled to prestigious galleries around the world - the Brooklyn Museum, the Smithsonian in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. in 2014 a retrospective of his works was held for the first time at the National Art Gallery (NDG) in Vilnius

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