Bidlauskas / Jusionis / Šnipaitė. Pull and Push

This is how doors are opened in Latvia. This is how three friends from Vilnius prepare for an exhibition in Klaipėda. Three different media, three dispositions. One shared movement – through the door.

This movement often begins spontaneously: a hand reaches out, a step is adjusted. To pass from one space into another, you usually don’t need to read the instruction labels stuck by the handle. Yet the play of translation turns an easy physical action into something heavy, tense, resistant.

In the initial phase, ideas don’t arrive – they push in. While in Klaipėda, the friends decide they should return with a group exhibition. Fueled by wind-blown enthusiasm on Smiltynė Beach, they plan how next year they will swing open doors here, confront the gallery space and the audience, raise a glass.

The idea brought back to Vilnius lives on like a piston. Then comes a period best described by the verb ‘pull’. Doors are latched from the inside; social space contracts into an internal one – introspection, doubt, reconsideration. Everything begins to resemble a dragging procession in which everyday life, an uneasy political background, and information overload are pulled along, permeating the work not as a theme but as a state of being.

Within it, irony, play, relentless work, and brief hedonistic gestures become ways of resisting stasis. In response to this condition, different strategies are mobilised. Raw force and civilisation intertwine boldly. Naivety becomes a form of truth. The image folds in on itself, and a colour-driven scarcity pushes back against the flow of meaning.

In Augustas Bidlauskas’ graphic works, movement is slow and precise. The images are black and white, fragmented, as if extracted from their original context and suspended against a white background. The body becomes the primary object – broken into parts, observed up close, colliding with elements of nature, cultural markers, and traces of human presence, yet never assembled into a unified narrative. The mezzotint technique demands persistent, monotonous labour. This is pulling: a process in which every detail and halftone matters. In this graphic language, doors do not swing open suddenly; they yield only gradually, through time, resistance, and craft.

Linas Jusionis’ painting is like athletic training. Everyday motifs – snow freshly fallen or lingering from winter, the serpentine track left by a bicycle, a ski-jump tower – are rendered not as events but as states that emerge through repetition, the accumulation of detail, and fragmentary memory. Looking, too, becomes an exercise that demands commitment. The motif is not there to be recognised so much as experienced, both plastically and associatively. This is pushing: working with the image as a spatial construction, constantly rearranged, balancing between excess and lack, as if perpetually postponing the final straight.

In this exhibition, Marija Šnipaitė’s sculptural practice works through a form of play that only pretends to be light. Sketch-like, graceful gestures in form and material create spatial relations that weave together everyday rituals, visual experiences, and cultural references. More than one image is borrowed from children’s activities and their associated attributes. In selecting motifs for her works, Marija abandons their customary functions and materiality, concentrating instead on the objects’ relationship to sensory experience. Sculpture here functions not as a stable object but as a process, reflecting time, movement, and mood; this situation demands orientation and direction: sometimes one has to pull, sometimes to push.

The three artists emerged on the art scene at roughly the same time and have since followed and reflected on one another’s work, staying in touch as friends; until now, however, they have not held a joint exhibition, aside from occasional encounters in larger group shows. Pull and Push seeks to bring those ongoing conversations and distinct creative practices into a new space, where relationships between the artists and the works form new points of contact and a different order.