Between reality and dream. The world I would like to live in

Painter Ričardas Filistovičius' solo exhibition "The World I Would Like to Live In", dedicated to the author's 75th birthday, presents a broad panorama of the artist's work spanning several decades. The exhibition brings together early works from the 1970s from the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and the MO Museum, as well as 26 of the latest canvases from recent years.

R. Filistovičius is a painter with a distinctive style, combining modernist expression, surreal imagery, and classical painting principles in his work. Remaining an individualist from the very beginning of his creative path, the artist has created a unique world of imagination where human life dramas, passions, philosophical insights, fantasy, and reality intertwine.

One of the most prominent motifs in R. Filistovičius' painting has become the Old Town of Vilnius – its streets, intersections, parks, squares, fragments of buildings, and church towers. However, in the painter's canvases, Vilnius is not just a recognizable cityscape. It becomes a stage for a mystical, theatrical world where reality merges with fantasy, and monumental human figures, strange creatures, animals, and echoes of art history emerge among the familiar contours of the city.

The artist's work is full of metaphors, paradoxes, symbols, quotes, sarcasm, and self-irony. Elements of classical painting collide here with signs of modern civilization – bright color accents, inscriptions, city signs, and geometric shapes. By changing scale and the usual laws of space, cities and streets move into the seas and the vastness of the sky, and familiar reality takes on a dreamlike, surreal form.

The exhibition title is borrowed from R. Filistovičius' 1981 work "The World I Would Like to Live In", held at the MO Museum. This title aptly describes the artist's entire body of work – a consistent effort to extend the experience of reality in painting and to create a space of his own where Vilnius, man, nature, history, and imagination exist according to different laws.

Ričardas Filistovičius was born in 1951 in Vilnius. From 1969 to 1975, he studied painting at the State Art Institute (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts) and has been participating in exhibitions since 1978. For a long time, he taught art at the Vilnius Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium. In 1999–2000, the artist was awarded the highest-degree state scholarship. His works have been acquired by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the National M. K. Čiurlionis Art Museum, the MO Museum, and private collectors in Lithuania and abroad.

The exhibition curator is Nijolė Nevčesauskienė.