On Entering and Exiting the Fourth Dimension with Gedvile Bunikyte

Portrait of the Artist Gedvile Bunikyte (a.k.a. Grace B) 

by Helena Wimmer (2015)

For those of us who do not belong to the art world and have only limited knowledge of what goes on in this realm where lines and colours and large sums of money reign supreme, there's long been a belief that Suprematism died sometime shortly after Socialist Realism triumphed over geometric abstraction; i.e., when the brutal expression of political ideology negated pure artistic feeling.

Apparently, however, that wasn't the case: Suprematism survived - and still lives on to this day, as we discover in the fascinating work of Gedvile Bunikyte, a.k.a. Grace B., over whose pictures the ghost of Malevich lingers.  

Using a few basic shapes and a limited range of colours, Gedvile takes us back to the future and dares us to experience again the intensity of emotion that belongs to art whenever it frees itself from the banal attempt to visually depict objective reality and allows itself to dream of unseen worlds and vibrate to strange rhythms and possibilities of being.

Miss Bunikyte is, we might say - using a rather old-fashioned idea - an artist of the fourth dimension. In other words, whilst she wants to make some kind of real (but withdrawn) presence immediately visible within the realm of time and space, thereby introducing into our field of vision  something which is neither optical nor merely symbolic, she wants also to transport us to a very different space that is, if you like, outside the gate. 

Nietzsche thought of this space as one of dangerous knowledge, full of tigers and rattle snakes and all the other wonders that the hot sun hatches. But for Gedvile, it needn't be quite such a savage exteriority and contains not only wild beasts, but mathematical equations and beautiful abstractions; a creative realm in which things come to perfection and new forces and forms arise.  

Now, all this might sound suspiciously like the worst kind of mysticism or idealism; an attempt to leave behind the real world of things. However, I'm tempted to think that we might better interpret Miss Bunikyte's work as a weird and speculative form of realism; albeit one concerned with virtual objects rather than actual entities. Thus, unlike those who find all forms of geometric abstraction puerile, I think there's something philosophically interesting and contemporary about her work.     

Gedvile tries to find her own way forward governed by a certain precision, clarity, and discipline. But so too is there a rhythmic violence and an experience of chaos in her work, adding to its beauty and its power. Follow the rhythm and plunge into the chaos and you'll reach the point at which lived experience confronts its limit.

But, crucially, rhythm also relates closely to the question of sympathy - a concept central to modernism - and, by her own confession, Miss Bunikyte is primarily interested in exploring how colours and shapes can express a physiology of feeling. In other words, she's an artist who wants us to feel our way into tomorrow and who, via a series of ever more fascinating abstractions, attests to the intrusion of an occluded realm into the visual world of figuration. 

By providing an artistic medium between natural science, esoteric philosophy, and personal fantasy, Gedvile has created a visionary system and an uncanny paraspace that is both inspirational and transformational; pulsing with real and imaginary energies, her geometrical abstractions challenge and reconfigure the earlier fourth dimensional constructions of late nineteenth and early-twentieth century art.

Like Ouspensky whom she so admires, Gedvile provides us with a small key to the enigmas of the universe. And for that we should be grateful.

Planets, Mountains and Mystical Planes (2014)

Note: those interested in knowing more about Miss Bunikyte and seeing further examples of her work should visit her website: studiogedvilebunikyte.com 

Anyone Can Be Van Gogh With an iPhone

Sunfuckingflower (2015) by Stephen Alexander

Bored, I decided to take a picture of the one cheerful thing in the room: a sunflower. Still bored, even after taking the picture and looking at it for a second or two and wondering at its heart of darkness, I sent it to a friend who is a lover of all things floral.

She replied: "I suppose this proves anyone can be Van Gogh if they have an iPhone."

This struck me as a rather curious remark. One sensed a degree of hostility beneath the irony, although whether this was for me as an amateur snapper or for the specific tool used to capture and send the image, I'm not entirely certain. The remark did, however, remind me of something that D. H. Lawrence once wrote:

"When Van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as a man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualise the sunflower far more perfectly than Van Gogh can."

Is this what my friend was, in her own rather mocking manner, trying to hint at? Was she, like Lawrence, seeking to defend the fourth dimensional aspect of an artwork; i.e. that magical quality which remains incommensurable with the painter, the object, or the technology involved in creating a visual image?

Perhaps. Otherwise, she's just being sarky ...!


See: D. H. Lawrence, 'Morality and the Novel', in Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele, (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 171. 

Note: No ears were mutilated in the production of the above image.