Besimaudanti Moteris 1930

Vytautas Kairiukstis seems to have made this painting of an industrial city street with oils on canvas. It's moody! Dark blues and browns and umbers that are cut by flashes of pale yellow and orange. I get the feeling Kairiukstis was interested in how the light hits these factory buildings, in the stark contrast between light and shadow. I can imagine him standing in the cold, quickly laying down the scene as the sun sets. Did he want to show a quickly modernizing world, or a quiet moment in a busy industrial city? See that figure there, walking on the right? It’s just a dark, roughly-hewn shape, but it gives a sense of life, doesn’t it? The textures are all rough and uneven, like patches of memory. It’s a feeling – the feeling of being in a place – rather than an exact likeness. I think about other cityscapes, like those by the Ashcan School in the U.S., and I see a conversation happening. It's a conversation about how we experience the urban world, capturing something fleeting, transient. This painting is an open question, an invitation to wander and wonder.