Vaclovas Krutinis

Biography

The first exhibition outside Lithuania to show Krutinis’s work took place in 1974, a year after he finished his studies. The list of cities later grew: Moscow, Riga, Tashkent, Gothenburg, Athens, Beijing, Helsinki, Linz.

Vaclovas Krutinis was born on 27 September 1948 in Vilnius. He first attended ordinary Vilnius schools, and from 1960 to 1966 the Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis School of Art in Vilnius, a secondary school for gifted children. In 1973 he graduated from the Art Institute of the Lithuanian SSR, from the sculpture department. From 1978 he was a member of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. In stone, wood and metal he made works of very different kinds. For public spaces he produced “Shadows of the Waves” in Klaipėda (1984), “Memory of the Homeland” in Kupiškis (1987) and “Bird” in Palanga (1997). There were also smaller-scale works: “Memory” (1987), “Narstinys” (1998) and “Link” (2000). Monuments form a separate group: “Standard-Bearers” in Ukmergė (1982), Dionizas Poška in the village of Bijotai (1990), General Jonas Černius in Kupiškis (1998), and “To the Guardian Angels” in Vilnius (2005), dedicated to police officers killed in the line of duty. The monument to the architect Laurynas Gucevičius in Kupiškis was made in 1982 but not erected until 1994. He also made about seventy gravestones for well-known figures in science and the arts and for private clients.

Among his works is a granite composition on the grounds of the Republican Vilnius Psychiatric Hospital in Naujoji Vilnia (New Vilnia). It was conceived as an image of a person being born anew after treatment. The year is given variously as 1987 or 1988.

Human figures predominate in his sculpture, often in groups of several figures, and animal motifs also appear. The forms are soft and streamlined, and the pieces decorative. From the 1990s, or according to some accounts from the 1980s, he increasingly built abstract compositions from separate segments. I think “Narstinys”, whose title points to composite constructions, belongs to this line, although I have not seen a description of the work itself.

He exhibited a great deal: he held ten solo exhibitions and took part in about fifty group shows. The solo exhibitions were held in Vilnius (1993, 1994, 1998, 2008), Šiauliai (2008) and Plungė (2009). He took part in sculpture symposia in Klaipėda (1977, 1979, 1984), Burgas in Bulgaria (1980), Czechia (1992) and Sweden (1994, 1995). For a European symposium at Kaisersteinbruch in Austria he made a work called “Lithuania”.

From 1998 to 2008 Krutinis was chairman of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. In the same years, 1998–2005, he sat on the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Art, and from 2000 he was a vice-president of the Lithuanian Association of Art Creators and of the agency of the Lithuanian Copyright Protection Association. From 2008 to 2011 he was a member of the executive committee of the International Association of Art (AIAP). His works are held by the Lithuanian Art Museum, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the National Art Museum of China in Beijing.

Krutinis died on 30 October 2013 in Vilnius. A posthumous exhibition was held there in 2014.