Bloodstone: Gediminas Akstinas and Patricija Jurkšaitytė 

25 April – 21 September 2025

Bloodstone brings together two accomplished artists and one distinct exhibition space. When three nationalised houses on what used to be the Verlängerte Alexanderstraße were conjoined and renovated for the Lithuanian Art Museum in 1978, the ground floor was adapted for displays of sculpture. To obtain extra hanging space for this duo exhibition most of the many windows in the largest ground floor gallery have been partially blocked, but the still-open sections offer views onto the museum garden with its geometric ponds and ivy-wrapped trees. 

 
Those temporary walls provide the material base for the new installation Orlaidės (Ventilation Windows, 2025) by Gediminas Akstinas (1961, lives in Vilnius). Nine unpainted softwood frames are affixed to the actual ventilation windows, which have been left unblocked to let in enough daylight. These frames, propped up by industrial steel hooks, stage a visual – and possibly also metaphorical – performance of airing and lighting that sets the tone for the whole exhibition.  

 
Akstinas is best known for his lentynėlės or ‘little shelves’, a hybrid mode of production and presentation that he came up with in the early 1990s and that has allowed him to freely employ elements of various visual arts: sculpture and architecture, drawing and painting. He has not yet reached a point of over-saturation with these assemblages of thought and form, and it is unlikely that he ever will. The format allows for ever-changing relationships between open and closed, empty and full, image and narrative. 

 
In this exhibition early-1990s incarnations of the ‘little shelf’ coexist with freshly made iterations, and the pieces come either alone or as sets labelled Lentynėlė ir atvaizdas (Little Shelf and Image), in which the architectural and sculptural elements are accompanied by watercolours that combine the figurative, the abstract and the emblematic. There are also unaccompanied watercolours, among them visions of street lights radiating darkness titled after A. Tumėnas street outside the Lithuanian Parliament in Vilnius, where ‘anti-vaxxer’ riots occurred in August 2021. These, in turn, are seconded by examples of a more recent invention by Akstinas, the spintelė or ‘little cabinet’ (essentially a shallow glazed wooden frame with or without content). 

 
In addition, Bloodstone features samples of his larger-scale sculptural work from the current decade, such as Noriu namo (I want to go home, 2020, an extended ‘little shelf’) and a collection of latex-covered sculptures descriptively titled Kokonas (Cocoon, 2018–24) and Tumba (Plinth, 2024). An untitled pencil drawing from 1989 of a makeshift brick-and-wood garden wall and a water tap anchors this selection from Akstinas’s oeuvre in his early meditations on materiality, texture and surface. 

 
Another significant contribution is his choice to paint one section of the temporary walls a washed-out shade of red ochre, to signal allegiance with his co-exhibitor Patricija Jurkšaitytė (1968, lives in Vilnius). Red ochre features prominently in her newest series of paintings. It is a pigment made from red hematite, a mineral form of iron oxide that has long been associated with physical and mental healing. This ‘bloodstone’ is said to help us understand our emotions and make decisions from a place of clarity. We are used to seeing it in prehistoric cave and rock paintings all over the world. 

 
In the last few years Jurkšaitytė has shifted her method and understanding of painting away from the mastery she had developed over more than three decades of paraphrasing classical pictorial composition and replicating traditional priming, grisaille and glazing techniques. She is finding herself a new place in painting, one where clarity comes from thorough deskilling and unlearning and success hinges on fast execution and the renunciation of any retouching once a sequence of premeditated momentary gestures has been performed. 

 
In series such as Pajūris (Seaside, 2023), Laiptai (Stairs, 2024) or Street View (2024) Jurkšaitytė experiments with simple materials and utensils: red ochre underpainting, white gesso, masking tape, decorative stencils, broad priming brushes. She synthesises smartphone snapshots of interiors, streetscapes or seascapes into a few irregularly shaped patches that can be masked off and painted over, sweepingly, with lighter or darker paint. When the masking is ripped off the image emerges as if from a developing bath, sometimes disfigured by the necessarily hasty production process. It feels like having to completely relearn the act of seeing – and the habit of thinking in images. 

 
A relatively large number of images made in this fashion are shown. Some of them, like Delfto plytelė (Delft Tile, 2023) or Trafaretas (Stencil, 2024), are deliberately simple and unassuming, while others, like Laive (In the Ship), Lisabona (Lisbon) or Birštonas (all 2024), are no less deliberatley complex and layered. These newer works, which make up the bulk of Jurkšaitytė’s contribution to Bloodstone, are counterpoised by a selection of her older works, on both canvas and paper, which retrace her early development as a contemporary painter with an strong but free and speculative relationship to art history. We see preparatory sketches and finished works from longer series such as Parts (mid-1990s) or Fragments (late 1990s and early 2000s) along with solitary works like Paskutinė vakarienė (Last Supper, 1998) or Thoughts on Aging (ca 2000). 

 
Almost all the exhibited works belong to the artists themselves, and many of them are shown in public for the first time. It is our hope that the exhibition will reveal new aspects of these two committed and consistent careers. Gediminas Akstinas and Patricija Jurkšaitytė belong to the generation of artists that emerged just after the restoration of Lithuania’s independence in 1990. Both of them have significantly contributed to rebuilding the country’s artistic self-identity and aesthetic self-esteem. 

 

 

 
Curator: Anders Kreuger, Director of Kunsthalle Kohta (Helsinki) 

Coordinators: Skaistė Marčienė Aurelija Malinauskaitė 

Exhibition Architect:  Marius Puskunigis 

Designer: Domantas Pigulevičius 

 

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