Vytautas Kumza

In 2017, Vytautas Kumža graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam (Netherlands), where he studied photography. He has held several solo shows in Lithuania and the Netherlands, and has taken part in group shows in Lithuania, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, France, Greece and the Czech Republic; his work was exhibited at the international art fairs Unseen, Unfair, Art Rotterdam and photographic festivals. A winner of the Ron Mandos Photo Talent Award (2017), the Sybren Hellinga Art Prize (2019), a nominee of the European Photography Award (2016) and many other awards. In 2019, the artist received the Mondriaan Fund Stipend for Emerging Artists and the scholarship of the Lithuanian Council for Culture. Currently he lives and works in Amsterdam.

Vytautas Kumža works with photography, but he sees it not only as a means of expression, but also as a reference point for his creative explorations. The most frequent objects of his photographs are temporary spatial structures, installations and other artistic interventions in the environment or the surface of the human body. Yet, they are not the centre of the artist's attention by themselves, but rather become a means of conceptual deconstruction of photography as a medium. In his photographs, Kumža blurs the boundaries between the genres (portraits become still-lifes, still-lifes turn into landscapes), between different fields (the aesthetics of commercial, advertising and product photography is combined with the expression and quotes of fine art), between real and fictitious shapes. More than in the depicted objects, the photographer is interested in the mechanism of their representation, the relation between an object and its image. By emphasising the processuality of creative work, with all its inconsistencies and randomness, often directly capturing the environment and equipment of a photo studio, he discloses the fictitiousness of the photographic illusion, and while simulating a perfect, aesthetically and ideologically significant image, at the same time denies its possibility. In this way, a gap appears between the traditionally indivisible object and its image.