The novelty of T. Gutauskas’s sculpture is especially evident within the context of Lithuania’s sculptors. In Lithuania, the plethora of 20th century sculpture went one way only – it poetized its bulk, searched for a distinct language for the form itself, and only rarely allowed the active power of space to enter the sculpture and then only to a set limit, preserving the sculpture’s mass of physical matter, its ponderous weight, its dense and evenly textured surface (for example, V. Vildžiūnas’s sculptures with their plasticity and game with perforations).
During the last decade of the last century, some young sculptors having had the opportunity to get better acquainted with the creative works of Giacometti, H. Moore, Calder, and Lehlembruck, began tolerating the opposing direction – searching for spacious forms. But this was a rare case because the majority went down the road of creating objects. T. Gutauskas’s work parts company within this context for he seeks to legitimize the rationale for this kind of sculpture where form in sundry ways opposes the active expanse of space.A new point of view towards scupture itself begins to form, embodying new relationships between space and mass which can be discussed as an airy form born betwixt a dramatic battle between light and form. In this sense, T. Gutauskas’s rather small, crested figurines of people are meaningful in that they change our traditional way of thinking about sculpture.
Nijolė Tumėnienė, doctor of art research
