After and Before
Romualdas Balinskas (Lithuania)
What happens to me addresses me – and calls for a response.
Martin Buber
AFTER everything that has been BEFORE…
BEFORE and AFTER exist in relation to the present. The past shapes the present, and the present slips into the past within a fraction of a second. What came BEFORE determines what follows AFTER.
Today, the focus is on living “here and now”, often at the expense of causality. In painting, however, the present works differently – as a transitional state where the future constantly becomes the past.
The marks left by the brush – and their fate, whether covered, washed away, erased or preserved – may seem to depend solely on the artist’s decisions. Yet they are always shaped by what has come BEFORE – in the artist’s personal experience and the world beyond.
After a prolonged engagement with figurative scenes and ironic, often sarcastic narratives, Balinskas has turned towards a more abstract, intuitive and immediate mode of expression – an approach at once therapeutic, reflective and existential.
For the artist, abstraction offers a way to reflect directly on history as it inscribes itself through events over time. The painting becomes a kind of postscript – a note appended to a note, AFTER the present and at once BEFORE it.
The work endures into the future – for all that will come AFTER, as contexts shift. Its meaning evolves with every exhibition, shaped by curatorial perspectives, titles, the space, and the viewer’s experience, each generating new chronologies of reinterpretation.
Tatjana Černova
Romualdas Balinskas (b. 1959, Šiauliai) is a Lithuanian painter and graphic designer. He studied at the Faculty of Arts at Šiauliai University, graduating in 1982.
Alongside his painting practice, he has worked extensively in graphic design. After fifteen years as art editor of Moksleivis, Balinskas established himself as a freelance book designer in 2002 and has since collaborated with leading Lithuanian publishers, producing around 600 book covers.
His exhibition record dates back to 1984 and includes group shows in Lithuania, Europe, Asia and the United States, as well as solo presentations in Vilnius, Kaunas, Berlin, Munich and New Delhi.
Balinskas has received several individual state scholarships (2012, 2016, 2020, 2022) and was awarded the Gold Badge of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association in 2019. He has been a member since 1990.
His works are held in the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the Lithuanian Art Fund and the Rothko Museum, as well as in private collections in Lithuania and internationally.
Curated by Tatjana Černova
5 June – 30 August 2026
Publicity image: Romualdas Balinskas (Lithuania). From the Before and After series, acrylic on paper, 200 x 160 cm (detail), 2024
