Jonas Švažas was born in the village of Urvikiai, Mažeikiai Region, Lithuania, on 05 August 1925. In 1953, he graduated from Vilnius State Institute of Art. In 1953-1976, he worked as a painting lecturer at the same Institute. He was granted the name of an Associate Professor. In 1975 he was granted the name of the Honoured Art Figure; the State Prize winner. In 1954-1976, the artist participated in the exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad. Died in Vilnius on 14 December 1976.

Paintings

"Švažas - a Lithuanian of forty years age - is a great and versatile talent, Expressionistic origin. Having mastered a pictorial technique, he is able to inspire life to canvas and to make it pulsate with his own fire", wrote Georges Boudille, an art reviewer of "Lettres Francaises", commenting on the works by Lithuanian artists displayed in the Paris World Painting Gallery.

The artist of a strong creative origin and inner powers is one of the most brilliant personalities of our contemporary art who expressed the ambitions and ideas of the whole period of Lithuanian art.

For Jonas Švažas, a picture served  as a fusion of the structure of the form, the colour impression of the thought and feeling as well as of the will and improvisatory outburst. He devoted much attention to the reality of industry of the period - secondary nature - in which he discovered a rich source of inspiration for plastic ideas and forms. He made an attempt to gain a deeper insight into this sphere of the 20^th century mind by way of an intensive compositional thinking, the language of complex structures and pictorial courage, displaying the range of man's spirit and power as well as the hidden mystic threat, presenting unique solutions to the problem.

The series of vessels and trees as well as the nature and Vilnius landscapes vibrate with changes in the inner moods. They present artist as a bard of the most intimate experiences of nature who opened the world of poetic concentration, a pictorial passion and contrastive colours. He was eager to deny the banality of everyday routine by way of the courage of creative fantasy, striving to impart the maximal flight to plastics as well as to render the pulse of the dramatic character, tension and expression of life.

The creative power, fostered from the inside, was one of the artist's aesthetic ideals, closely connected with the ideas of innovation and originality. Jonas Švažas perceived art in a wide context of the development of his own nation and the world, emerging as an impetuous figure of artistic movement with a wide scope of interests, as a gifted organiser of artistic life fighting against the stagnation of a creative process.

Exhibitions

Personal exhibitions:
1963 - in Vilnius, 1965 - in Vilnius Art Museum, 1970 - in the Art Museum of Riga, Latvia, also in the Art Gallery, Vilnius.
Posthumous personal exhibitions:
1977 - in Vilnius Contemporary Arts Museum, 1978 - in Moscow, the Arts Gallery in Kuznetskij most, 1980 - in Sweden (Skelleftea, Kiruna, Pitea, Sandviken cities), 1980-1981 in Austria (Vienna, Salzburg etc.).