Architecture, sculpture and materials: female Lithuanian artists are celebrated in Nîmes

Twin exhibitions at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes celebrate the work of two female Lithuanian artists as part of a season celebrating the nation’s culture across France. Projects by Aleksandra Kasuba take over a whole floor, exploring the life’s work of an artist who passed in 2019, leaving behind an increasingly recognised archive and legacy of a practice sited between utopian architecture, immersive installation and public sculpture.

As a counterpoint, a series of project rooms are offered to existing and new pieces by Marija Olšauskaitė, who plays with the surface and material qualities of glass, silicone and paper across a suite of works that speak to one another, the legacy of Kasuba, and the architecture of the host institution.

Aleksandra Kasuba, ‘Imaginer le futur’ at Carré d'Art, Nîmes

Opened in 1993, the Carré d'Art was designed by English architect Norman Foster as a forward-thinking cultural centre, speaking to the history of Nîmes and a perfectly preserved Roman temple across the city square. Both buildings present a clarified architectural order, and logical clarity that seems to be wilfully challenged by both artists, especially across the wide-ranging exhibition of Kasuba.

Curated by Elona Lubytė, the exhibition loosely follows a chronological path through Kasuba’s works, introduced in the opening room with a comprehensive chart of the artist’s life. It presents a fascinating personal and cultural journey: her birth in 1923 into a wealthy family, five years after the restoration of Lithuanian independence; her 1944 escape from imminent Soviet occupation through Europe into the USA; then growth as an artist and key artistic relationships within a vibrant post-war arts scene; and through an emergent recognition as an artist and educator, building immense public sculptures and immersive environments.

There is joy in Kasuba’s switching between scales and play with material. Marble mosaic artworks – made in the early 1960s, after Kasuba had met Louise Nevelson – speak to a wood mosaic made a decade later with similar, swirling patterns. Over that time, however, ambition, stature and scale had grown, with the latter work a maquette for a 1973 brick relief public sculptural work built into the façade of New York’s Lincoln Medical Center. Interested in interjecting public space with texture and pattern, carefully choreographed to changing light, Kasuba created other expanded wall and paved works – her final project of the type was a street-level wall of the World Trade Centre, lost in the 2001 disaster.

Kasuba’s passion and nuanced reading of architecture runs through the exhibition, especially present in the presentation of a 1971 environment made across an entire floor of the artist’s own Victorian brownstone Upper West Side home. Using what became a creative signature – the stretching of translucent fabric into biomorphic, tensile, inhabitable spaces – Kasuba created a utopian, dreamlike environment that squeezed itself around domestic architecture. Work such as this that exists for a temporal moment would be hard to present in an exhibition had Kasuba not richly documented her projects – here, Lubytė presents a floorplan, scale model and blown-up photos of the environment’s occupation.

However, one other environment can be experienced to help bring immediacy to an understanding of Kasuba’s work. As the experiential highlight and most Instagrammable moment of the exhibition, the artist's 1975 model, Spectrum An Afterthought, has been constructed at full size, filling the gallery with seven connected silos, cleverly lit as a rainbow gradient and with an enveloping soundscape (the original intent also featured colour-coordinated scents as a total immersive experience). The installation was originally created for a 2014 presentation of Kasuba’s work in Vilnius, curated by Lubytė with Kasuba’s input, five years before her passing.

Even prior to that celebratory exhibition of her life’s work, Kasuba – along with contemporary artists and friends such as Jonas Mekas and George Maciunas – had been recognised as an important figure in Lithuanian culture, but following it the artist became an ‘older sister’ figurehead for a new generation of Lithuanian artists. Filmmaker Emilija Škarnulytė, for example, met Kasuba in 2018, building an acquaintanceship and developing work in homage to the elder artist. Škarnulytė is now one of many artists showing work during a four-month celebration of Lithuanian culture across France, comprising hundreds of events and exhibitions.

Marija Olšauskaitė, ‘The Softest Hard’ at Carré d’Art, Nîmes

One of those artists is Marija Olšauskaitė, born in 1989, whose sculptural work is profiled in a four-room curation by Carré d'Art’s director Jean-Marc Prevost. There is poetic conversation with Kasuba’s practice, both artists having an interest in mutability of material, surface and a softening of threshold. A series of screens and floating blue panels made of material recovered from a Lithuanian glass company that closed in 1990 – the year of the nation’s independence from the Soviet Union – look as though they are still slowly flowing. Next door, low-level glass sculptures, titled Pond, invite a contemplative gaze into histories of material and people.

The materials then subtly shift. An installation of glowing panels tricks the eye; reading as more glasswork, it is in fact illuminated paper collage. Then a room of fluidly hanging stretches of silicone speaks back not only to melting glass, but also to Kasuba’s practice of expanded and forming fabric into new spatial experiences.

Both presentations work within the structured geometry and frank orders of Foster’s architecture. The floor tiles, ceiling grids, and rhythms of louvres to control light all act as a foil for the material and spatial escape both artists explore. Through it, other narratives emerge, not only connecting two generations of Lithuanian practitioners, but also through the conception of space, with a questioning of materiality and how gestures of disruption can carry subtle politics of place.

Aleksandra Kasuba, ‘Imaginer le futur’ at Carré d'Art, Nîmes, until 23 March 2025

Marija Olšauskaitė, ‘The Softest Hard’ at Carré d’Art, Nîmes, until 23 March 2025

For more on the Lithuanian season, see saisonlituanie.com