Between Reality and Dream: The World I Would Like to Live In | Ričardas Filistovičius

The solo exhibition “The World I Would Like to Live In” by painter Ričardas Filistovičius, dedicated to the artist’s 75th anniversary, presents a broad panorama of his work spanning several decades. The exhibition brings together early works from the 1970s from the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and MO Museum, alongside 26 of the artist’s most recent paintings.

Ričardas Filistovičius is known for his distinctive artistic language, combining modernist expression, surreal imagery and principles of classical painting. An individualist throughout his artistic career, he has created a unique imaginative world in which human drama, passion and philosophical reflection intertwine with fantasy and reality.

One of the most recognisable motifs in Filistovičius’s work is the Old Town of Vilnius – its streets, intersections, parks, squares, architectural fragments and church towers. Yet in his paintings, Vilnius is more than a recognisable urban landscape. It becomes a stage for a mysterious, theatrical world where reality merges with fantasy and familiar cityscapes are inhabited by monumental human figures, strange creatures, animals and echoes of art history.

His work is rich in metaphors, paradoxes, symbols, quotations, sarcasm and self-irony. Elements of classical painting encounter signs of contemporary civilisation – vivid colour accents, inscriptions, urban signs and geometric forms. By altering scale and disrupting conventional spatial relationships, streets and cities appear amid seas and vast skies, transforming familiar reality into a dreamlike, surreal world.

The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Filistovičius’s 1981 painting “The World I Would Like to Live In”, held in the collection of MO Museum. The title also captures the essence of the artist’s broader practice – a consistent desire to extend the experience of reality through painting and to create a world of his own, where Vilnius, people, nature, history and imagination exist according to different rules.

About the artist

Ričardas Filistovičius was born in Vilnius in 1951. From 1969 to 1975, he studied painting at the State Art Institute (now the Vilnius Academy of Arts) and has participated in exhibitions since 1978. For many years, he taught art at Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium in Vilnius. In 1999–2000, he was awarded the highest-level Lithuanian state scholarship for artists. His works are held in the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, MO Museum, as well as in private collections in Lithuania and abroad.

Exhibition curator: Nijolė Nevčesauskienė