Shared Languages

Does an artwork’s impact depend on who made it and how? Sometimes we notice similarities in form, colour combinations and rhythm before we know anything about the people who created the works. Their stories reveal how different experiences and intentions can lead to a shared visual language.

Shared Languages brings together works created between 1930 and 1990 by formally trained and self-taught Lithuanian artists. These juxtapositions invite us to look at Lithuanian art history from a different perspective. For a long time, an artist’s formal education played a major role in how their work was valued and its place in art history.

Today, these hierarchies are being questioned, along with the categories used to classify art. What do terms such as ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’ art actually tell us, and what do they obscure? Why are some works recognised as art, while others are presented merely as ethnographic objects? The focus shifts to the works themselves, their visual language and meanings.

The works in this exhibition reveal different ways of reimagining the visible world. Human figures and objects depart from realistic proportions; memory and imagination reshape space, which does not necessarily follow the rules of perspective. For some formally trained artists, this meant deliberately breaking the rules they had learned – finding new ways to create a more compelling visual language. Self-taught artists may have arrived at similar solutions by a different route – through independent exploration, experimentation, and their own experience and imagination.

We invite you to set aside the labels attached to artists and take another look at their work. What makes us stop and look? What moves us or makes us laugh? The exhibition focuses on the artworks themselves, their visual language and their impact on viewers.