Romance & Gravity
2020In 2018 during their residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the contextual design duo of Marija Puipaitė and Vytautas Gečas began artistic research into the decor. Taking as their point of reference the idea that the Baroque epoch at its outset was associated with something ‘peculiar and unnecessarily complicated’, they linked it to the depreciation of decor in our everyday environment. While analyzing historical artifacts and techniques, they focused on the actualization of decor and its possible manifestations in the context of contemporary design.
All of this, together with practical experimentation and a playful approach to contemporary materials techniques, became embodied in Romance & Gravity, an eclectic collection of furniture and interior accessories.
Seeking to reintroduce decor in the present-day context, Marija Puipaitė and Vytautas Gečas employed such decorative elements as frames and folds and transformed them into autonomous, almost conscious functional works. The mirror frame, which itself became a mirror, and the dresser, inspired by racing technology, display motifs of deformation and fluidity, as if their form was shaped by time and speed
Pictures by Darius Petrulaitis
Envisioned Comfort
2020in collaboration with Marija Puipaitė
It’s a series of objects based on the construction that allows a broad variety of shapes. More elements you have - more detailed curves you can get. Therefore, this construction can be applied to almost any furniture you imagine. On the one hand, it’s a complex object with lots of elements. On the other hand, not alike other soft furniture - these are completely honest and openly showing the way they are built. The rhythmical construction allows admiring carefully crafted elements - the beechwood joints and the brass fittings. By merging two different design practices Marija Puipaitė (organic, human body based shapes) and Vytautas Gečas (complexity, fragmentation, layering) found a common point where the construction defines and forms a fluid shape into an ergonomic entity.
Pictures by Darius Petrulaitis
My Private Collection
2014-...My Private collection is a constantly growing collection of rare and strange curiosities from home and abroad. It is a pre-idea stage of a creative process and an environment observation practise. Similar to a cabinet of curiosities, the installation is a defragmented world of things; it forms new relationships between objects and offers the possibility to see the artefacts of our milieu in a new light.
Exhibition documentation by Andrej Vasilenko
Envisioned Comfort
2018Chaise longue Envisioned Comfort
in collaboration with Marija Puipaitė
One of us had a fantasy about an object that could bring a womb-like pleasure, meaning - the ultimate satisfaction that the material environment can give. We merged our two different design practices into one object taking this fantasy as a starting point.
Such abstract mode of thinking, we found, allows to erase what we know about domestic objects and opens up the possibility for re-thinking and re-creating them.
However, the same way the mind gives a clear body to the fantasy by restraining, the construction defines and forms a fluid shape into an ergonomic entity.
The concept was first presented at the exhibition La Terrasse Vol. 4 - Fantasy, curated by Erez Nevi Pana during the Dutch Design Week 2017.
Now a finalized chaise longue is being presented at Milan Design Week 2018 as a part of Ventura Future project, in the Loreto district at FuturDome, the former meeting place of the Futurist movement.
Picture by Vytautas Narkevičius
Two Pants Hanger
2015Hanger made for “Voveraitė gallery” instalation by Kipras Dubauskas during “Crown off” exhibition (artist - Žilvinas Landzbergas, curator - Asta Vaičiulytė) at Contemporary Art Center in Vilnius.
Pictures by Vytautas Narkevičius
