In the mid-1960s, Valentinas Antanavičius, who had studied graphic and mural art at Vilnius Academy of Art, embarked on making assemblages, or, in his own words, 'an art crafted from old toys and other items'. It was a rejection of the platform established under the Soviets of traditional painting in the mandatory style of Socialist Realism.

The painter showed his portraits, prints and water-colours at official exhibitions, reserving his different art, his grotesque paintings and assemblages, for events held by cultural institutions or private individuals which escaped such close surveillance by the authorities. These events were part of alternative artistic life, which was later called Silent Modernism.

This work combines painting and assemblage. The painterly composition of the background is generalised, and appears as an abstract space partitioned by a low horizon, which emphasises the gloomy and oppressive area of the sky. A disproportionately large figure of a Pioneer girl is made from found objects (parts of plastic dolls, bits of the Soviet school uniform). Situated in the foreground, like a ghost, it threatens to block out both the earth and the sky. This ominously tilting figure, peering at the viewer with its dead eyes, resembles a scarecrow, or a disconcerting prophet of bad omens, or even death. One more step, and the monster will break out of the frame of the painting …

Assemblages by Antanavičius, especially those he has made since the 1990s, are characterised by social criticism and political implications. They are images of the distorted, phantasmagoric socialist reality, combining features of Surrealism, and 'Socart', which spread illegally in the Soviet Union from the 1970s, showing the real face of the system.