Fernweh ("Yearning for afar")

In the exhibition "Fernweh" ("Yearning for Afar") you can be inspired and imagine yourself far away. Like the Jugendstil artists, you too will be moved by the magic and beguiling beauty of nature. The ocean, a place of longing like no other, appears here in all its many guises: gentle in summer, framed by the sun, sand, and striped beach chairs, but also as mighty waves of menacing power. It has been painted and drawn in equally diverse ways: impressionistically, expressionistically, in other works almost abstractly. The goddess of love, Venus, who was born out of the foam of the sea and whose naked beauty has been a popular motif for many artists, is de rigueur, of course.

The selection from the museum’s collection features works by several renowned artists, among them Emil Orlik, Walter Leistikow, Lovis Corinth, Clara Siewert, Adolf Hölzel, Ida Kerkovius, Ernst Mollenhauer, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. This fast forward through twentieth-century art history concludes with recent works of art photography, including the documentation of a joint project by Christo, who passed away shortly before its completion, and his artistic colleague and wife, Jeanne-Claude.

The presentation ends with an interview filmed by the artists of the prizewinning Venice Biennale project “Sun & Sea” for the KOG. Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė, and Lina Lapelytė answer questions about their innovative opera performance in a staged beach scene. They were inspired by places on Lithuania’s Baltic coast that had also moved generations of artists before them.