(AV17) gallery at VOLTA New York

About

The VOLTA Art Fair primarily took place in Basel in 2005 and, soon after, was launched in New York City in 2008. Every year, VOLTA NY presents over 50 galleries that showcase both well-established and emerging artists from around the world. Participating galleries are encouraged to present a single artist, which provides a more extensive view of their work and helps to maintain the curatorial coherence of the international art platform.

This year, the gallery is presenting the works of sculptor Mindaugas Junčys, who questions notions of beauty, kitsch, popular culture, and tradition. By addressing these categories, the artist rethinks the meaning of the artwork and the duality of the human inner world within the contemporary context. The artist uses materials usually associated with classical sculpture, such as marble, granite, or bronze, and gives them the shape of everyday objects. In this way, the artist raises one of the main questions that often echoes in his work – how an object taken from cultural heritage becomes an object of kitsch, and vice versa – how an object of kitsch becomes part of the culture. Junčys’s works turn into metaphors, revealing the problematic nature of changing values in contemporary society.

Gallery (AV17) booth C4

The project is partly supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality