Exhibition of the work of Pranas Lapė (1921 - 2010), 4 February – 6 March 2011

"On Friday, February 4, at 5 p.m., the opening of the exhibition of the Lithuanian art classic Pranas Lapė (1921–2010) will take place at the M. Žilinskas Art Gallery of the National M.K. Čiurlionis Museum of Art (12 Independence Square, Kaunas).

The work of Pranas Lapė is diverse and wide-ranging. In addition to frescoes and graphics, scenography and ceramics, he gave most of his spiritual energies to painting. After living in America for half a century, P. Lapė was influenced by abstract expressionism. For a fateful turn in his work, J. Paintings by Polokas, and later by W. de Kooning, A. Gorky, its colors and impressive sizes of paintings.

Nature and its structures also meant a lot to the artist. He himself has admitted that black stone cliffs and stones, the greenery of the forest and meadows, and the bruise of the water came to the paintings from the seaside environment.

With his abstract paintings, Pranas Lapė occupies a special place in Lithuanian art. "His paintings give a serious tone to Lithuanian abstract expressionism. The powerful artistic force and expressive suggestion of the artist's works are achieved by the minimalist color gamut – achromatic consonances of black and brown, gray and white. The colouring is reminiscent of the colours of the earth, and the surface of the paintings is enriched in places with the textures of prints – it is associated with the infinite variety of forms grown by the soil. The composition is usually made up of vertical and horizontal – it gives plastic elements strength, stability, something constant and eternal, what a person longs for when he has lost a safe home, bright childhood memories, eternal values that do not pass away. In this way, the artist expressed in a specific artistic language those values that the generation of the diaspora lost in a foreign environment, where the rhythm of life changed, where permanence was replaced by the cult of novelty and dynamism," says the curator of the exhibition Nijolė Tumėnienė.

One of the most prominent Lithuanian painters – painter and graphic artist P. Lapė was born on 11 January 1921 in Klaipėda.  He had to spend most of his life abroad. In 1941–1943 he studied monumental painting at the Kaunas Institute of Applied Arts. Having received some knowledge about the art of ceramics from L. Strolis, he mainly worked together with V. Manomaitis and delved into the artistic and technical possibilities of functional ceramics. Later, in 1953–1975, he returned to ceramics while working in schools in the United States. Then his ceramics changed, they were decorative, close to sculpture.

In 1944, he moved to the West via Germany, Finland and Norway, and from 1945 he lived in Sweden. There he continued his art studies at the Anders Beckman School of Art in Stockholm (1945–1946), where he taught drawing after graduation. He created murals for two world events: the World Sports Exhibition (1948) and the Hall of the World Congress of Nurses (1949).

In 1949, after arriving in the USA, New York, Manhattan, he began to work in the field of advertising, where he collaborated in the prestigious publishing houses "Donbleday", "Scribners", "Random House" and others, created over 300 book cover projects, illustrated the works of famous Lithuanian authors, among which A. Baranauskas' "Anykščių šilelis", Maironis' "Ballads" and Algimantas Mackus' "The Land of Pets" stand out. A. Baranauskas' "Anykščių šilelis" was republished in Lithuania in 2009. In 1957 he moved to Rowayton (Connecticut), where he taught and created several art programs for private secondary schools in the states of Connecticut and Massachusetts, which received special recognition from the specialist commission. It was only at the age of 57 that he was able to devote himself solely to creativity while living in Chamberlain, Maine.  He has exhibited his paintings in individual exhibitions on Long Island (1965), Chicago (1969), New Kentan (1980), Brooklyn (1981), Boston (1985) and group exhibitions of Lithuanian expatriate and American art.

In 1998 he returned to Lithuania. Here P. Lapė was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of the Grand Duke of Lithuania Gediminas.

For the last three years of his life, the artist could not paint because he did not see the light of day. He died in Vilnius on January 13, 2010."