Zilvinas Kempinas, TUBE, 2009.
Zilvinas Kempinas, TUBE, Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Lithuanian Pavilion, 53rd Venice Biennale, 2009.

Žilvinas Kempinas (born 1969 in Plungė, Lithuania) is a contemporary visual artist. He lives and works in New York City.

Biography

Zilvinas Kempinas studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts during the time when Lithuania was one of the first republics to declare sovereignty from the Soviet Union in 1990. He graduated the Academy in 1993. Kempinas exhibited works that merged paintings, sculptures, performance art and installations. He collaborated with Oskaras Koršunovas and created set designs for "The Old Woman 2", "Hello Sonia New Year", "The Flying Dutchman", and "PS Byla OK" which won him the 1998 Kristoforas Award for Best Drama Theater Stage Design.

Kempinas moved to New York at the end of 1997 and received an MFA in combined media from Hunter College, City University of New York in 2002. His first New York show took place at PS1 Contemporary Art Center in 2003. In 2007, Kempinas was featured by Art Review Magazine as one of its 'Future Greats'.[1] In the same year, he was awarded the Calder Prize and a residency at Atelier Calder in Saché, France. In 2008, the artist exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art[2] and, in 2009, in a solo show at the Kunsthalle, Vienna.[3] In 2009, Kempinas represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale 53rd International Art Exhibition in Venice, Italy.

In 2012, Kempinas was awarded the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Arts.

Works

Zilvinas Kempinas, Double O, 2008.
Zilvinas Kempinas, DOUBLE O, 2008, installation view, Atelier Calder, Saché, France.

"Mr. Kempinas has an unusual ability to derive the maximum effects from the slightest of means. It gives his work a resonant economy and, for all its banality, a poetic relationship to the world at large." – Roberta Smith[4]

Kempinas employs nontraditional materials to create active and dynamic exhibits, most commonly as installations. In many of his works, Kempinas utilizes his signature material, unwound magnetic tape. The use of the tape affects the viewer through various senses; visually, aurally and physically. In his work Double O from 2008, he directed two large electric fans at two loops of magnetic tape causing them to seemingly perpetually fly and dance between the fans. At the Venice Biennale 2009, Kempinas presented Tube.[5] Located in the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Scuola Grande della Misericordia, Tube consisted of magnetic tape strung parallel to the ground creating a large translucent tube or tunnel that viewers can walk through.[6] The work addressed the physical and optical experience of the viewer, the passage of time, and the perception of the body and architecture.[7]"

“Utilizing industrial fans in his installations to undulate loops of videotape, Žilvinas Kempinas creates gracious gestures in space that are at once minimalistic and yet keenly present. What is most fascinating about Kempinas is not the materials he employs but the transformative experience that his work evokes through its immateriality. In response to the expanse of Calder’s studio and the surrounding hills, Kempinas began working on a much larger scale in Saché. The dimensions of his now famous Tube (2008), a shimmering walkway of magnetic tape that ultimately filled the Lithuanian Pavilion in the 2009 Venice Biennale, was maximally scaled to fit the volume of the Saché studio. Kempinas is the only resident whose work has registered those ideal proportions that Calder designed for himself in 1962. – Alexander S. C. Rower[8]

"I am attracted to things that can transcend their own banality and materiality to become something else -- something more. I am going for something fundamentally natural. Looking at one of my works can, I hope, be like watching a flame or a running river. I want people to forget for a second what they are looking at and inhabit a parallel world, where abstract things make perfect sense as long as you are willing to take the time to look." – Zilvinas Kempinas, interview with Veronica Roberts, Museo Magazine.

Notable Exhibitions

Selected Collections

References

  1. ↑ Art Review Magazine, "Future Greats: 25 Artists You Need to Know
  2. ↑ Exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2008
  3. ↑ Kempinas 2009 show at Kunsthalle wien
  4. ↑ Smith, Roberta (2006-02-10). "Art in Review; Zilvinas Kempinas". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2021-08-20.
  5. ↑ Kempinas's Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale
  6. ↑ Tube in Venice
  7. ↑ E-flux review of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2009
  8. ↑ "Calder Prize". Calder Foundation. Retrieved 2021-08-20.


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