Europos Parkas
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Europos Parkas is an open air museum located 17 km away from Vilnius. The museum gives an artistic significance to the geographic centre of the European continent (as determined by the French National Geographic Institute in 1989) and presents the best of Lithuanian and international modern art.
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[edit] Collection
The open-air museum exhibits over 90 works created by artists from Armenia, Belarus, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Egypt, France, Finland, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Moldova, the Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Russia, the USA and Venezuela.
The collection includes large-scale works by the contemporary artists Magdalena Abakanowicz, Sol LeWitt and Dennis Oppenheim[1], among others.
Three of the pieces that are most frequently mentioned by the park's international visitors are:
- LNK Infotree, by Gintaras Karosas, was included in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's largest artwork. The sculpture, which includes 3,000 TV sets, is a 700-meter-long labyrinth in the form of a tree, with a toppled statue of Lenin in its center. The monument evokes television's power to disseminate propaganda, and the eventual regrowth of the truth.
- Monument of the Centre of Europe, by Gintaras Karosas, is a series of granite plaques on which are chiselled the names of all the capital cities of Europe and their respective distances from the park.
- Voices Underground, by Patricia Goodrich, is a multimedia presentation that voices forty-four artists from fifteen countries by sowing wildflower seeds and planting flowering bulbs over a three-hundred-square-foot site. The audio component includes artists speaking about their artistic journeys, creative processes, and life passages, in English and in their native languages.
[edit] History
Europos Parkas was founded by the sculptor Gintaras Karosas, who was a nineteen-year-old art student when he initiated the project. In 1987 he found a place near Vilnius that struck him as a home for his vision, and started landscaping the site.
In 1991 Karosas placed the first sculpture at the site, marking the birth of Europos Parkas. The contribution of a work by the American conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim in 1996 excited international interest in the project. Today, the 55 ha sculpture park displays more than 90 works of art by artists from 27 different countries. Gintaras Karosas continues to be involved in new contributions: the location of each piece is carefully chosen to harmonize with the site's water features, its surrounding trees, shrubs, and flowers, and its daily patterning of lights and shadows.
[edit] Ongoing activities
Since 1993, the park has hosted annual International Sculpture Symposiums; it hosts international artist-in-residence programs twice a year. Concerts and festivals are held, and a conference center is located at the park.
