Neringa Černiauskaitė

  • Inga Meldere, Students Painting Some of the Remarkable Scenery in the Park, 2016, ink-jet print, acrylic, and oil on canvas, 43 1/4 × 25 1/2".

    Inga Meldere

    Coloring books for adults have gained surprising popularity in recent years. They promise “relaxation” and “creativity,” and perhaps an escape from the digital hum that has come to dominate modern life in favor of something done by hand. Besides ever-popular floral motifs, the books often incorporate graphically vibrant imagery from mandalas, Japanese woodblock prints, and ancient Egyptian and Greek visual history.

    In “House by the Waterfall or Colouring Books for Adults,” Helsinki-based Latvian artist Inga Meldere harnessed this burgeoning hobby both as a method for creating her new paintings

  • Donna Huanca, POLYSTYRENE’S BRACES, 2015. Performance view, December 6, 2015. Gabija Birina. Photo: Ansis Starks.

    Donna Huanca

    A painting needs a body if it is to move freely in space. And if the surface of the painting were the skin of that body, the paint would serve as clothes. Set the body in motion and the painting becomes unfixed, its textures and colors forming fleeting compositions. Painted clothes are stripped of their usual function—they smear or crack, dry up and flake off, and in this way they tell stories about the body they occupy. Such fluid interplays of painting, clothing, and memory abound in POLYSTYRENE’S BRACES, 2016, the surreal installation by Bolivian American artist Donna Huanca, recently

  • Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas, Psychotropic House: Zooetics Pavilion of Ballardian Technologies (detail), 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view. From XII Baltic Triennial. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko.

    XII Baltic Triennial

    Imagine a car after a Ballardian crash. Its internal mechanical guts are turned inside out while its wide interior is flattened into a narrow hole. Its rear becomes its front, and its entry points are blocked, opening new ones on its surface. Now imagine this form as a modernist building. That’s Palace of Re-Invention, 2015, the exhibition space invented by the artist/architect Andreas Angelidakis for the XII Baltic Triennial. Invited by this year’s triennial curator Virginija Januškevičiūte. to reinvent the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC), Angelidakis transformed the building into a disorienting

  • Nina Canell, Brief Syllables (detail), 2014, telecommunication and electricity cables, steel, wood, dimensions variable. From the series “Brief Syllables,” 2014–.

    Nina Canell

    The very first thing one encountered upon entering “Mid-Sentence,” Nina Canell’s recent solo exhibition, was a nail. It was embedded in the gallery wall, but instead of having been hammered in, the nail’s sharp point faced out, toward the viewer. A few more nails loosely hung from its tip, creating a fragile chain. They were held together by a magnetic force—invisible, but powerful—that permeated their little “bodies” with a flow of energy.

    The works of the Swedish-born, Berlin-based artist allow the viewer to perceive normally imperceptible dimensions of reality—not only flows of

  • Merike Estna, Camouflage Painting Show, 2014, oil on canvas, house paint. Installation view.

    Merike Estna

    Merike Estna’s exhibition “Blue Lagoon” forces the visitor out of the comfortable position of being merely a viewer: One can step on painting, eat it, wear it. Painting spills over to the floor; it takes the form of cakes, cocktails, books, and videos, while the vivacity of light pastel colors and vibrant patterns immerses the visitor in an overall sensory-cultural experience. On entering the expanded space of painting, one finds the hierarchies separating it from the decorative arts and everyday life dissolving. The installation is filled with all sorts of objects. But whatever they are—hats,