She is now the most emblematic artistic figure of her native country. Aleksandra Kasuba (1923-2019) has even eclipsed her husband, Vitautas, a traditional sculptor prominent in 1930s Lithuania, long forgotten. Academicism was not the cup of tea for this artist from the cultured aristocracy of Eastern Europe who, until her death at the age of 96, never stopped seeking, imagine and experiment with habitats of the future. The war got involved, deciding its destiny: in 1944, following the Nazi and Soviet occupations, the Kasuba were forced to flee Lithuanian territory. After three years spent in a transit camp in Germany, they settled in the United States. While Vitautas Kasuba’s career is losing steam, Aleksandra’s is soaring. In her New York studio, where the couple settled in the early 1960s, she designs visionary spatial environments made of stretched fabrics. Right angles are banned, curves celebrated in an ideal of human harmonization around nature.
At the crossroads of architecture, design and installation, the work of Aleksandra Kasuba is almost unknown here. Jean-Marc Prévost, the director of the Carré d’art de Nîmes, discovered its singularity in Vilnius and decided to offer it a first retrospective in Western Europe (until March 23), as part of the Lithuania Season In France. We first discover the artist’s first paintings and mosaics, in which emerges the “Wanderer”, a small character of a solitary walker who, like a dreamy alter ego, runs through all his work.
Aleksandra Kasuba in one of her first contemplative environments, New York, 1970.
/ © The Lithuanian National Museum of Art, Estate of Aleksandra Kasuba
Then come the major projects, sometimes remaining in the state of mind-blowing models of finesse and precision, all witnesses of an experimental art geared towards the awakening of the senses and the soul. Among the most spectacular pieces is Spectrum. An Afterthoughta monumental structure designed in 1975, using synthetic fabrics, colored filters and neon lamps. The visitor is invited to immerse himself in this series of curves where, as the artist wrote, who documented a large part of his production, “the light brings out the colors, separates them, disperses them, mixes them , lightens them, darkens them and carries them away.”
The Carré d’art exhibition is enriched with period contributions from Aleksandra Kasuba’s friends, such as the perfumer Danuté Pajaujis Anonis, the filmmaker Pola Chapelle, the avant-garde director Jonas Mekas and the founder of the Fluxus movement George Maciunas . If the latter is considered the precursor of contemporary art, Kasuba remains a pioneer in the field of textile arrangements by “advancing the extraordinary interface between the subject and the environment”, in the words of his compatriot, the art historian Inesa Brasiské.
As if to synthesize his quest for harmonization between man, nature and technology, Kasuba launched in 2001, in the terms of learned mathematical reflections, the construction of the Rock Hill House in the New Mexico desert. An extension of the surrounding landscape with organic shapes and built with local materials, the house is a true cocoon of curves which, once again, invites contemplation and challenges orthogonality. The hyperactive octogenarian lived there until 2012, before returning to her native land to donate her works and archives to the National Art Museum of Lithuania. Today, the star in his country finally finds the light in our latitudes.