Bastys Darius
Immortality, 2008 The story of Pinocchio’s transformation into a boy and loss of eternal life.
Beauty, 2008 About all people’s fondness of beauty and desire to decorate their environment (in this case, it is an allusion to wedding traditions).
Dramatic Still Life, 2011 Merely a collection of things found at home or an allusion to some dramatic story.
Dramatic Landscape, 2009 An attempt to relate current issues in the style of the old classics.
Marine Motifs, 2010 A guinea pig (sea pig in Lithuanian) and another marine object whose scale the pig cannot comprehend, they are like two different worlds.
A Magritte-like Day, 2012 A dramatic painting alluding to the motifs of a favourite artist.
Alien, 2012 A childhood dream, one of the scariest ones.
Studies, scholarships
1985-1993 Vilnius Academy of Arts, Department of Sculpture
1995 Scholarship of the Boswil Artists House (Switzerland)
1997(?) Young artist’s scholarship of the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania
Major exhibitions
Solo exhibitions
2012 Five Years, Lietuvos Aidas gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania
1996 Jutempus gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania
Group exhibitions
1999 Lithuanian Art 1989–1999. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
1998 Homo Silvanus. Wooden sculpture symposium. Baltic Culture Centre, Hasselby, Sweden
DDD. Artists’ Studio, Vilnius, Lithuania
All That is Human and Necessary. Lietuvos Aidas gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania
1997 DDD. Arka gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania
Focus: Vilnius. Galerie im Trudelhaus, Baden, Switzerland
Lithuanian Dialogues. Stazione Marittima, Trieste, Italy
1996 To Be Alien. Neuenburg, Holderbank, Switzerland
For Survival. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
New Lithuania. Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, Poland
Subordination. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
1995 1995: Lithuanian Art. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
Crossroad. International creative summer camp, Tartu, Estonia
Christmas exhibition. Aargauer Kunsthaus, Arau, Switzerland
1994 Irreversibly. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
1994 Bread and Salt. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; 1995 – Edinburgh Art College; Cornerhouse gallery, Manchester, UK
1993 Between Sculpture and Object – in Lithuanian. Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania
Art critic on…
The paintings of Darius Bastys (…) would hardly have been produced had painting been “alive”. (…) Perhaps it’s not so much painting as freewheeling experimentation. By juggling associations, Bastys has created a style without a style, varying from “the old masters” to “pop art”, (…) albeit actually being none. He employs an anti-contextual tactic, grotesquely revealing that avoiding the context is impossible anyway. An inevitable paradox: the simpler and more elementary the chosen point of departure, the more semantically complex the end result. But what does this have to do with painting and its death? Absolutely nothing. Bastys does not pretend to be engaged in painting (or manages to hide that skillfully); neither does he pretend to be its gravedigger.
Kęstutis Šapoka
Keywords of creative practice: art therapy
Artists who inspire me: Rene Magritte, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, John Everett Millais, Arnold Bocklin, Edouard Manet