On 19 May, the Andrei Sakharov Centre for Research on Democracy Development at Vilnius City Hall organised an auction of paintings by former Foreign Minister, diplomat and signatory Petras Vaitiekūnas and symbolic bricks created by Ukrainian ceramicists in order to raise funds to provide psychological assistance to Ukrainians. The auction, hosted by the Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Lithuania, Jack Twiss Quarles van Ufford, sold all the works selected for the auction, plus others that were on display.
Five paintings by Petras Vaitiekūnas – “There Waits III”, “A Father and His Two Sons”, “A Father and His Three Sons”, “A Young Jew Looking at the Stars” and “The Last Supper” – were sold at the open auction. Other paintings were available for purchase in a silent auction, where interested parties could write their bid on a piece of paper. All the paintings by Petras Vaitiekūnas were exhibited for a couple of weeks at the Maler exhibition.
Together with the Cultural Initiatives Group “Kvadratas”, an exhibition of Ukrainian ceramists “Brick by Brick” was organised at Vilnius Town Hall, symbolically marking the theme of bricks needed to reconstruct Ukraine after the war. The 5 works selected for the auction were by Alina Okara, Liubov Yakimenko, Nadia Nechkina, Oleksandr Stelmoshenko and Olena Leshchenko. All of them were very well received by the auction participants and have already found their owners.
“The auction was a great success, we sold everything that was selected, and still people bought artworks through the silent auction. In total, we raised over €10,000. We also raised funds through a benefit concert featuring the New Ideas Chamber Orchestra NIKO and Ukrainian pianist Alexey Botvinov. We are very happy and grateful to the people who contributed. We are going to organise another auction at the end of this year or next year to sell other paintings by Petras Vaitiekūnas and decorative bricks made by ceramicists from Ukraine,” says Prof. Robert van Voren, Director of the Andrei Sakharov Centre for Research on the Development of Democracy at the State University of Latvia.
The auction was part of a series of events dedicated to the anniversary of the birth of Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov. The money raised from the auction and the concert will be used to provide psychological support to Ukrainians who came to Lithuania and those who stayed in their country. The funds will go to the self-help programme ” Samopomoshch” (Selfhelp), which provides remote counselling to people living in Ukraine on how to cope with the trauma caused by the war, and has already been a great success. Another part of the funds will go to a crisis centre in Vilnius, which provides psychological support to Ukrainian refugees.
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