Born in 1969 in Plungė (Lituanie). Lives and works in New York.

In residence at the Atelier Calder from January to June 2008

Lithuanian artist Žilvinas Kempinas explores the possibilities of movement in sculpture through a language of striking formal simplicity, extending the legacy of kinetic art and Op Art. Since the 1990s, he has focused in particular on the plastic and vibratory qualities of magnetic tape from video cassettes, which has become his material of choice.

Working with immaterial, elemental forces such as air and light, the artist is less interested in producing objects than in setting up perceptual situations. While his practice resonates with an infra-thin sensibility, it nonetheless generates poetic events that occupy space with a strong, almost physical intensity.

Now obsolete, though once widely used at the time he began working with it, magnetic videotape is not approached for its original purpose of recording image or sound. Instead, Žilvinas Kempinas draws on its material qualities—its lightness, flexibility, and reflective surface, which catches and modulates any available light. At the same time, the residual memory embedded in the medium lends the works an added depth, a form of latent “energy” offered up to the viewer’s imagination.