Exhibition "From smithery to jewellery” 1960-1990 artistic metalwork in the collections of Lithuanian art museum

Contemporary artistic metalwork is not a dominating field of art in Lithuania and its development was complicated and inconsistent. Despite that, in a relatively short time it has achieved a surprisingly high level. The small number of artists of the field working in Lithuania is already well known not only in our country, but beyond as well. Jewellery and fine artistic metalwork flourished in the 9th decade of the 20th century and quickly gained attention not only from the public, but the art critics as well and perhaps this was the reason to slightly forget the first steps of the professional Lithuanian artistic metalwork, as well as various genres, processing techniques and tendencies of that time. In fact, the history of Lithuanian artistic metal consists not only of jewellery that everybody likes and miniatures of various genres, but also interior elements, home accessories, medals and prizes. Aside from elite jewellery, jewellers created standards for serial production and among the modern internationally recognized jewellers there were artists, who had an individual approach towards the tendencies of applied arts of the time and the taste of the society. The goal of the exhibition “From Smithery to Jewellery”, held on October 27, 2011 – January 15, 2012, at Vilnius Picture Gallery was to reveal the slightly forgotten artistic metalwork of the soviet period, which was cast into the shade by the new postmodern artistic metalwork. The exhibition displayed selected artistic metalwork created by Lithuanian artists in 1960–1990 from LAM collections. In the article the author provides an overview of the creative features of the artists that created in the period mentioned and whose works were exhibited in the exhibition “From Smithery to Jewellery”, as well as common mainstream tendencies in the field of artistic metalwork