"CITY HEXAMETER" BY MIGLĖ KOSINSKAITĖ AND PEETER KROSMANN

Six years is actually the span of time during which a couple of artists have been residing and creating in Kaunas City. Actually, in Ancient Greek, hexametron is made up of hex meaning six and metron representing a unit or a measure. We may wonder how much time it actually takes to ‘measure’ a city. To get to know its specific features, to get accepted by its communities, to grow up one’s memories… The authors are laying down their memories and writing a diary of a painter. This is a peculiar epic with a particular rhythm, repetitions and interludes which serves to tell their story.

“The way a poem is more than its sheer words, or a score of a musical composition goes beyond the collection of dots and lines – in exactly the same way a picture is more than a canvas covered with blobs of paint. It depends on the skills, choices and responsibility of the viewer how much music he or she is able to find in that score,” these are the words of Peeter whose pictures feature not only well-known, but also hardly ever seen city views. These city glimpses gain some peculiar metaphysical sense and resonance.

Meanwhile, the hexameter of Miglė is woven in between the urban community and abstraction, from the reflection on the sharpened human relationships to the desire to ward oneself off the external world, and thus transfer to an entirely different epoch and lock the door. 

MIGLĖ KOSINSKAITĖ (born 1965, Vilnius, Lithuania) is a painter who has been living the last three decades in Kaunas. She graduated from her studies of painting at Vilnius Academy of Arts in 1989, and since 2001 she is a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. Her personal exhibitions have been held in the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Russia and Ukraine. The works of Miglė Kosinskaitė are usually surreal by nature, and they connect the realistic depiction of a human body or an animal with the decorative shape or a geometrical pattern. The themes of her pictures are usually of the theatrical or cinematographic nature, and this impression is further strengthened by the masks and costumes which they artist is keen to employ in her works. The mystical and imaginary characters in a real landscape, or real elements of the cityscape melting away in an imagined space tend to arouse the imagination of the viewer. It is fairly common that the position of the main character is taken by various design, architecture or pop culture icon.

PEETER KROSMANN is an artist coming from Tartu, Estonia, who is currently living and creating in Lithuania. His studies of art started in the studio of Konrad Mägi in 1989. Later on, he earned a degree of Bachelor of Arts (painting) at Tartu University. Since 2000, he has been teaching painting, illustration, animation and the art of comics at Tartu Kunstikool (Tartu Art School). He is primarily known as a promoter of the traditional genres of painting, notably, portrait and landscape. He mostly works from nature and is also a master of lithography and sgraffito, as well as an author of comics.

Peeter Krosmann spends lots of time painting on a variety of techniques. These may be small-scale sketches from nature depicting the environment, landscapes or outlines registering the movements of a body, or else these may be the impressions and states of a day. The works of the artist also feature abstract or nearly abstract, phantasmagoric compositions which may exist as independent works of art or serve as concepts for future works in the fields of graphics or painting, or even turn into a comic series run by the artist.