The Lithuanian National Museum of Art presents its spring programme dedicated to the acquaintance with the old and contemporary forms of artistic expression from the collections of Lithuanian and foreign collections
For the spring of 2025, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA) presents a broad exhibition programme featuring foreign and Lithuanian artists. The LNMA departments in Vilnius, Klaipėda and Palanga invite to get acquainted with the old and contemporary modes of artistic expression in the artwork from museum collections in Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine, the Netherlands, USA and elsewhere.
Fourteen-exhibition-programme embraces themes as the Jewish People and their relationship with images, remembrances of the Holocaust, passage from youth to adulthood. The programme includes events that symbolically mark birth anniversaries of significant 20th-century Lithuanian artists and bring centre stage from obscurity the early women photographers’ strong voices, showcasing them alongside with contemporary creators. Visitors interested in curatorial ideas and research behind each of the exhibitions, are welcome to book guide services and educational workshops.
Vilnius: reflections on complicated pasts and the bashfulness of youth
From 5 March, Vilnius Picture Gallery hosts an exhibition You Shall Not Make an Image. Commandments, daily life and change, an exploration into contradictory Jewish People’s relationship with images. This exhibition that marks the centennial anniversary of the founding of the YIVO Institute in Vilnius, is centred on different interpretations of the Second Biblical Commandment by the Judaic tradition and Christian Civilization. On display are Jewish religious, secular, monumental and applied art pieces from the 18th to the first half of the 20th century from the collections of the YIVO Institute in New York, from Lithuania and other European countries. The exhibition is on until mid-September.
28 March the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Vilnius opens its grand exhibition, Silver Girls. Retouched History of Baltic Photography, introducing the art by 21 early women photographers from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. They not only worked in the shadow of men, as retouch technicians, picture copyists and assistants, but also founded their own studios and shaped the aesthetics of the period, contributing to the expansion of commercial photography and establishing photography as a branch of art. Though parallels between the development of photography in the three Baltic countries are seldom drawn, the works from three contemporary artists Marge Monko, Diāna Tamane and Goda Palekaitė are expected to succeed at bridging this divide in the upcoming exhibition.
From 30 April the NGA presents its new permanent exhibition of Lithuanian art from the 1st half of the 20th century. Originally opened in 2009, since then the display experienced several curatorial interventions. Yet, as the needs of visitors keep changing, to meet them, two curators, Giedrė Jankevičiūtė and Gabrielė Radzevičiūtė, have been invited to reshape four permanent exhibition rooms introducing a new approach to story-telling and ways of displaying the exhibits. Their curatorial project is family-with-children-centred and will offer integrated education and workbooks that will facilitate independent exploration of inter-war Lithuanian children’s literature, the artists’ childhood world and their games.
The Radvila Palace Museum of Art (RPMA) of the LNMA started the spring season with the exhibition Everything You Are Not Supposed to Do (13 March – 28 September). The exhibition curator Monika Kalinauskaitė invades the “forbidden” territory and invites to discover the practices of contemporary women artists within an unusual context of the museum’s permanent exhibition of the old art, featuring nearly a hundred of Western European art pieces from the 15th through the 19th centuries. Among these “vibrant profiles of the old world” the curator integrates 21st-century pieces by women artists in the LNMA’s collection. Such juxtaposition draws attention to the diversity of present-day techniques and genre and the dramatic contrast in the take on some of eternal themes.
9 April the Radvila Palace Museum of Art opens an exhibition Post Ars. The Post Ars group emerged in 1989 and really stood out on the Lithuanian art stage through their eccentric ideas and unorthodox for that time forms of art. Visitors will have an opportunity to see acts in space of this longest enduring group – their installations and actions and the most recent work by individual group’s members (Aleksas Andriuškevičius, Robertas Antinis, Česlovas Lukenskas, and Gintaras Zinkevičius).
At the end of May RPMA will host a solo exhibition by Janina Sabaliauskaitė (b. 1991), a photography artist on the rise in Lithuania and abroad. Her artwork chronicles daily life, leisure and love of LGBTQ+ people. The upcoming exhibit will be a new series by the artist, dedicated to the expression of sexuality by couples and communities with all kinds of disabilities.
4 April, Vytautas Kasiulis Museum of Art opens an international exhibition We Are 17 coordinated by Meno avilys. At its core is a homonymous photography series by the Dutch film-maker and photographer Johan van der Keuken. It is composed of 30 portraits of young people taken by him in 1955, when the artist was 17. These spontaneous, open pictures show the generation of post-war teenagers moving towards adulthood. In the exhibition, over a hundred of portraits by 17-year-old Catalonians, Lithuanians and Romanians enter into a dialogue with the work by Johan van der Keuken. Until 11 May, the exhibition will be accompanied by educational events and screenings of Johan van der Keuken’s and Jonas Mekas’ films.
At the end of May, VKMA opens an exhibition by Tania Mourad (b. 1942). The contemporary French artist brings to Vilnius her exhibit In Honour of Pain Reborn, dedicated to the memory of the victims of Holocaust. The exhibition put together specially for Vytautas Kasiulius Museum of Art includes 41 pieces where she continues hew explorations of the Yiddish writing and new reflections on Litvak memory and heritage.
From 11 April, the Museum of Applied Arts and Design hosts a jewellery exhibition Touch-Sensitive featuring collections of jewellery by 23 artists from the Latvian Jewellery Association with portraits of wearers selected by individual artists.
From 17 April through 14 September, the MAAD will host a retrospective of Stasys Ušinskas (1905–1974): the Iceberg of Lithuanian Modernism. Professor Stasys Ušinskas is among the most esteemed Lithuanian artists of the 20th century, largely inspired by Cubism and Constructivism. The retrospective, curated by Dr Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė, and celebrating 120th birth anniversary of the artist, will include, besides his broadly best-known works (stained glass, marionettes, glass vases, drawings and other), two previously unexhibited historical paintings from the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
Artistic winds from Ukraine and Japan at the coastal venues of the LNMA
The audience that fell for Japanese popular culture at the National Art Gallery in Vilnius, should start planning trips to coast Lithuania to see the exhibition Japanese Kabuki Images in Ukiyo-e Woodblock Prints, which is on at the Palanga Amber Museum through 27 April. It is an opportunity to see a rare and unique collection of colour Ukiyo-e woodblock prints from the collection of the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko National Museum of Arts, evacuated to Lithuania. The prints stage a boisterous space of socializing and entertainment, such a contrast to our awe-stricken silence dominating theatre atmosphere.
24 April Pranas Domšaitis Gallery in Klaipėda opens I Give You Sunlit Art, the exhibition of the celebrated Ukrainian visionary folk artist Maria Prymachenko (1909 – 1997), already received with love in Vilnius. The collection was evacuated from the Zaporizhzhya Regional Art Museum. These badly damaged works evacuated to Lithuania in September 2024 are being restored at the Pranas Gudynas Restoration Centre of the LNMA. The works, a veritable profusion of flowers, phantastic animals, scenes of daily peasant life and symbols, are not only a feast to the eye, these days they keep reminding of the wounds of war.
24 April, too, an exhibition by the painter Patricija Jurkštaitytė and the sculptor Gediminas Akstinas, Blood Rock opens at the gallery. The exhibition curator Anders Kreuger compares the earlier and contemporary artwork by the artists of individual voices, symbolically referencing the red ochre.
The last project by Pranas Domšaitis Gallery this spring is an exhibition Compositions by Antanas Gudaitis, Lithuanian 20th-century artist of a complicated fate. From 15 May, the rooms open to visitors, will feature Gudaitis’ creative period perceived as his best by the artist himself, from 1959 till his passing away in 1989. The painter’s artwork will be expanded by materials from Algimantas Kunčius’ photography archive, with film and still pictures evoking Gudaitis’ studio environment and glimpses of his private life.
The spring season of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art invites to take a fresh look at the life, our own reality through different lens – from religious symbolism to playful experiments. Each project is expanded by specially designed programmes inclusive of lectures, discussions, film screenings, tours, creative workshops for different age groups. Alongside with temporary projects, the LNMA keeps up its activities of One’s Own Museum tailored for individuals with developmental disorders and carried out by the museum’s specialized staff.
