“More Than Just Beauty: The Image of Woman in the LAWIN collection”, 12 October – 11 November 2012

"On October 12. An exhibition of art treasures accumulated by the law firm LAWIN has been opened at the National Gallery of Art.

This exhibition was organized to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the law firm's activities. The exhibition "Not only beauty. The Image of a Woman in the LAWIN Collection" is thematic: the works presented in it reveal how women were imagined and depicted by Lithuanian artists of the late eighteenth and early twenty-first centuries, i.e. Authors who were born, studied, and lived in Lithuania, regardless of their national origin.

The visual narrative presented in the exhibition is divided into eight parts: "Image for Memory", "Embodied Vision", "Childhood Charm", "Mother", "Working", "Desired", "Ethnographer's Gaze", "Object of Nature Studies". Each of these parts is accompanied by a short commentary by the curator Dr. Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, which is expanded by the annotations of individual works prepared by her.

The audience of the exhibition is given the opportunity to get acquainted with the works of recognized Lithuanian artists circulating in the country's art market, as well as with the works of authors who are less represented in museum collections, thus bringing back the Lithuanian heritage found in other countries. From this point of view, the paintings of authors who have not yet been included in the national discourse of art history, first of all, graduates of the Faculty of Fine Arts of Stephen Báthory University (Halina Bobaryk-Modelka, Kuzma Churyl, Mykolas Dobriak, Edvardas Karniejus, etc.) deserve particular attention. However, the greatest values of the collection are examples of the legacy of our art classics Antanas Gudaitis, Jonas Mackevičius, Kanutas Ruseckas, Pranciškus Smuglevičius, Kazimieras Stabrauskas, Adomas Varnas, Justinas Vienožinskis, a considerable collection of works by Stasys Ušinskas from various periods, early paintings by Vytautas Kasiulis and Kazys Varnelis, rare bronze castings of sculptures by Juozas Zikaras and Petras Rimša, as well as works attributable to Vytautas Kašuba, Antanas Martinaitis, Audronė Petrašiūnaitė,  Jonas Rimša, Adolfas Valeška Gold Fund.

Since ancient times, art collecting has meant financial support of private individuals for the creation and dissemination of art, which is carried out by the artists themselves, the galleries representing them, antiques, and auction houses. In other words, art collecting is one of the forms of patronage of artistic culture. Thus, the number of art collections and their artistic quality mean the vitality of society, its creative powers, which substantially contribute to ensuring the general welfare. The exhibition of the LAWIN collection confirms that alongside the well-known foreign Lithuanian collectors and patrons Kazys Varnelis or Mykolas Žilinskas, contemporary patrons are rising, encouraging us to remember the names of the art collectors who laid the foundations of national art collections at the beginning of the twentieth century – doctors, engineers, landowners, military personnel, priests and, of course, lawyers.