Concrete-sculpture symposium
Author: Dovile Tumpytė
Keywords: abstract art, experimental sculpture, site-specificity, symposium
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- (From left to right) Vladas Urbanavičius, Vytautas Jakubauskas, Mindaugas Navakas, Kęstutis Musteikis, and Naglis Nasvytis by the concrete sculpture Moonlight on the grounds of the Construction Parts Factory, 1985. Photo: Raimondas Urbakavičius (courtesy of Raimondas Urbakavičius).
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- Artists in front of Kęstutis Musteikis’s sculpture, 1984/85. Photo: Raimondas Urbakavičius (courtesy of Raimondas Urbakavičius).
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- Mindaugas Navakas, Obstruction, 1984. Photo: Raimondas Urbakavičius (courtesy of Raimondas Urbakavičius).
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- Ksenija Jaroševaitė, Lying, 1984. Photo: Raimondas Urbakavičius (courtesy of Raimondas Urbakavičius).
Date: Autumn 1984–Spring 1985
Participants: Ksenija Jaroševaitė (1953), Kęstutis Musteikis (1956), Naglis Nasvytis (1957), Mindaugas Navakas (1952), Vladas Urbanavičius (1951), Mindaugas Šnipas (1960) (sculptors), and Vytautas Jakubauskas (1954) (exposition designer).
Initiator: Mindaugas Navakas
Organizers: LSSR (Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic) Artists’ Union’s young sculptors section and the Construction Parts Factory
Location: Grounds of the Construction Parts Factory, between the Vilnius-Trakai highway and the railway.
Organized on the outskirts of Vilnius, the concrete-sculpture symposium was initiated by the young sculptor Mindaugas Navakas, who was concerned with sculpture’s relationship with the environment and sought to overcome the closed nature of its form. The young members of the sculptors section of the LSSR Artists’ Union and the architect Vytautas Jakubauskas supported his initiative. Cheap industrial material—concrete—was used to create the sculptures. The artists built the sculptures in situ, taking into account the specifics of the place—the brutal industrial environment—which they saw as an advantage and a challenge for their work. Navakas’s innovative approach later influenced the formation of the notion of the “expanded field of sculpture” in Lithuania.
