Sauka Šarūnas

Šarūnas Sauka was born in 1958 in Vilnius, in a family of intellectuals (his father is the famous philologist Donatas Sauka). In 1985 he graduated from the Lithuanian State Institute of Art (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts). Sauka has participated in 47 group exhibitions (until 1993), has held 6 personal exhibitions, the last one being a retrospective exhibition of his work at the Vilnius Contemporary Art Centre in 1998. In 1989, Sauka was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for the diptych “Žalgiris mūšis” (1987).

It is so true that such a controversial phenomenon as postmodernism in Lithuanian art criticism is gladly placed in the hands of Šarūnas Sauka. One of the strangest, one of the most complicated painters in the context of Lithuanian art, he is constantly accompanied by the word “different”. The same postmodernism in Lithuanian discourse also figures as ‘other’ – not very original, simultaneously attractive and frightening. So it is not surprising that both “others” constantly find themselves side by side.

Sauka’s “otherness” is very constant. Consistently working in the technique of oil painting, carefully, centimeter by centimeter discovering a naturalistic form that coagulates with rich color, materializing a hallucinatory plot with precise patience, Sauka, enjoying himself (especially enjoying his own suffering), exploits fears and problems of perception that torment more than one adept of radical postmodernism.

The technique seeks to surpass itself – painting greedily turns into meta-painting, literary associations are continuously duplicated, the demonic rush somewhere else and back remains stifled within itself. The same faces – Sauka himself and his family members (flesh and blood), the same flesh studded with jewels, transformed from nature, the life yearning in the flesh – the disease. The latter, like the inevitable pain, would seem to be the only gap of certainty in the space of myriad overlapping surfaces – the world according to Sauka.