On 17 December, exhibition by the monumental artist Nijolė Vilutytė opens at ‘apiece’, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

~ WAVE

In 1991–1992, at the dawn of of Lithuania’s Independence, Nijolė Vilutytė created in Palanga a three-part stained-glass work, Saulės takas (Path of the Sun), and Improvisations I–III (thin coloured glass, lead, approx. 18 sq. m.), together with the four-part fresco–sgraffito Sukūryje (In the Whirlpool). The works were integrated into Vilnius Municipality’s holiday residence Jūros vilnis (Wave of the Sea)(architect Mečislovas Valevičius), later renamed to Gintaras (Amber) and, still later, 9 bangos (9 Waves), built beside the botanical park and surrounded by pines.

Within its expansive spaces, high walls and the shifting rhythms of seaside light, Vilutytė’s stained glass seemed to glide through the interior. It captured the rhythm of the setting sun and the movement of waves, meeting real nature through open window segments. In this way, the stained glass linked the interior with the coastal landscape and became, at the same time, a metaphor for artistic expression and the country’s newfound freedom.

~ AFTER ~

In 2025, a decision was taken to demolish the building in Palanga. Although the stained glass was saved, the situation exposed a wider issue: while copyright law provides for the protection of a work’s inviolability, monumental artworks in Lithuania are often left unregistered, unprotected and unrecognised in terms of value. Moreover, monumental works created in the early 1990s, that is, in the first years of independence, carried no ideological charge at all, despite frequently being incorrectly labelled as Socialist Realism.

WAVE ~

In the exhibition ‘Wave after Wave’ at ‘apiece’, the stained glass appears in an entirely new state. It is no longer a link between interior and nature, but a dismantled structure. The gallery becomes a new architectural body in which the stained glass sheds its decorative function and takes on the character of an installation. The work becomes itinerant—no longer an improvisation within an interior, but a composition that speaks about shifting ideas of freedom, and about the desire to preserve memory and heritage. Although stained glass has traditionally been classified as applied art, over the past decade it has been returning actively to the field of contemporary art. Forms of expression once associated with monumental art have opened up to artists who move freely between disciplines and spaces. Vilutytė’s relocated work reveals not only masterful craftsmanship but also qualities of light, transparency and fragmentation that resonate strongly with contemporary aesthetics. It is a material that responds to its surroundings: to light, to the time of day, to movement. In the gallery, the work becomes a distinctive medium of interdisciplinary expression. It shifts from heritage into a conceptual field in which new narratives emerge about history, place and time, the public and the private, function and autonomy. ‘Wave after Wave’ travels from Palanga to Vilnius—a reminder, perhaps, that everything is in flux.

~ ~ ~

Nijolė Vilutytė (b. 1947) is a monumental artist who has created significant works for sacral architecture and public buildings. Among her most important works are the frescoes–sgraffito and stained glass in the Chapel of Blessed Jurgis Matulaitis at St Michael the Archangel Church in Marijampolė; the frescoes–sgraffito and stained glass in the Chapel of Mary, Queen of Martyrs in Elektrėnai; the fresco–sgraffito Tėviškė (Homeland) in the former Lithuanian Representation, later the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania in Moscow; the frescoes–sgraffito Kryžiaus kelias (Way of the Cross) and stained glass in the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Martyrs in Elektrėnai; the fresco–sgraffito Paukščių takas (Milky Way) in the ‘Ritualas’ funeral home in Vilnius; and the three-part fresco–sgraffito and stained glass in the Shrine of Divine Mercy in Vilnius. Vilutytė’s practice is characterised by mythological and religious themes, monumental and abstracted forms, and dynamic, rhythmic compositions.

Her works are held by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art and the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art. In 1999 she received the Lithuanian Government Prize for Arts.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė ir Aušra Trakšelytė

Exhibition architect: Mindaugas Reklaitis

Graphic design: Marek Voida

Text translation: Martynas Galkus

Exhibition funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality

Exhibition open until 3 February 2026

More about the gallery: apiece.lt

On November 7, exhibition by Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture (IXL) opens at apiece, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

IXL’s assembly of elastic material studies into semi-recycled plastics and their fixations into pre- or post-functional liminal forms are set at the showcase gallery as a nature morte—a superimposition of multiple artifacts of design thinking from 2020 to 2025. This is a multiple setup, one scenery of drafts made specifically for the apiece.

It can also be seen as a window into a landscape of a material situation—a horizon of prototypes from past and ongoing design processes, a material cross-section into a processual design practice. The installation explores an array of IXL studio’s works through a lens of the idea of fractal materiality: one instance of a creative process embedded within another.

The exhibition features fragments of monolithic leaks, casts, cuts, splinters, scraps, and shreds—artifacts from different episodes of interconnected but separate design attempts. Fixations of material observations, gathered across various periods of working with pre-recycled plastic, coalesce into a single composite of fluid forms—an archive of forms in transition. A set of antipodes of universalised cyclical waste purification and the exploration of elasticity and endurance of fossilized unrefined flux. These are not fully recycled materials—interruptions in the recycling loop, frozen mid-transformation. Suspended as static monoliths, they offer a critical lens into the geologies of plastic.

These liminal pieces are, at once, material extracts of larger processes and prototypes of elastic adaptation for a potential function. Suspended in the vicious cycle of recycling, the form offers a critical perspective on the human-influenced ecological crisis, where plastic becomes a footprint and a fossil of the Anthropocene.

Since 2020, artists and architects have been incorporating reuse and recycling processes into various architectural projects, working with both physical materials and their historical charges. According to the artists, material flow is one of the pillars of their studio practice a conversation with material in a broader context, emerging as a response to global material urgencies.

Isora x Lozuraityte Studio for Architecture (IXL) was founded by artists and architects Petras Išora and Ona Lozuraitytė in 2014 in Vilnius, where it is based. Creative duo exercise a cooperative practice, linking the spheres of architecture, public space and infrastructure, design, art, landscape and environments of display.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė, Aušra Trakšelytė

Assisting architect Gabrielius Dovydėnas

Graphic designer Marek Voida

Translator Martynas Galkus

Special thanks: Dovydas Alčauskas, Darius Jankauskas, Helga Packevičiūtė

Exhibition funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City Municipality

Sponsors: Gaudrė, Piritas

Exhibition open until 12 December 2025

Elisabeth Sonneck exhibition membrane at gallery apiece

On September 11, 6pm, Elisabeth Sonneck exhibition opens at “apiece”, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

The exhibition marks the beginning of an exchange programme between the galleries Super Bien! (Berlin) and apiece (Vilnius).

The exhibition is part of the 10th Vilnius Gallery Weekend www.vilniausgalerijusavaitgalis.lt.

For the exhibition Elisabeth Sonneck created a temporary site-specific installation membrane, which takes the characteristics of the exhibition space, the showcase gallery in public space, as the starting point for the intervention and questions the permanence and dissolution of visual and physical boundaries.

E. Sonneck’s artistic practice is based on painting: on long, rolled sheets of paper, she creates differentiated, multi-layered colour spectra in a repetitive improvisation that emphasises the immediate physical moment: the staggered stops of the multiple overlapping brushstrokes reveal complex spectrums of colour and rhythm. Colour is the elementary expression of mutual dependence – each colour gains its specific emotional energy in direct interaction with its environment.

On site, E. Sonneck uses the production-related roll tension of the paper in continuous metamorphosis and recycling for flexible embodiments. Instead of solid crystallisation, each piece of paper can take on different forms at different times and in different places, such as lying, leaning, hanging, etc. Artist’s scrollpaintings are brought into precise physical balances with often found objects from the urban space – painting and worthless everyday remnants collide in new symbioses. The view opens up to the abundance of the unstable, fragile, and transitory. The often precarious balance of elements explores architectural reality as well as traces and atmospheres of use, history, and social atmosphere of a place – transformed into colour.

Elisabeth Sonneck (b. 1962, lives and works in Berlin) combines painting, sculpture, and installation in site-specific interventions. Her artwork was widely shown in museums, art institutions, galleries, off-spaces and in public space. Solo shows: Raum Schroth im Morgner Museum Soest (DE), Spazio Insitu, Rome, IWE Art Museum Kunming (CN), Kunstmuseum Ahlen (DE), Museum gegenstandsfreier Kunst Otterndorf (DE). Group shows: Galeria Promocyjna, Warsaw, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan (IT), Studiogalerie HaL, Berlin, Kunstraum Hochdorf (CH), City Gallery, Prague, Künstlerhaus Dortmund (DE), Papiermachermuseum Steyrermühl (AT), Georg Kolbe Museum Berlin, Mies v. d. Rohe Haus Berlin, Guardini-Galerie Berlin, Staatl. Museum Schwerin (DE), nGbK Berlin.

Alongside her artistic practice, E. Sonneck curated/co-curated exhibitions focusing on contemporary research in the expanded fields of painting and sculpture, and since 2018, she has been running super bien! Berlin, an independent project space for site-specific projects.

www.elisabeth-sonneck.de

www.instagram.com/elisabethsonneck

Exhibition coordinator – apiece

Graphic design: Marek Voida

Text translation: Martynas Galkus

Exhibition funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Exhibition open until 26 October 2025

On 29 July, Marija Šnipaitė’s exhibition ‘Tinginys’ (‘The Lazy One’) opens at the ‘apiece’, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

The artist’s creative process explores the layered connections between everyday rituals and shared cultural visual experiences. Her reflections on these links take shape as spatial structures whose elements reject conventional functions and typical uses of materials. With this new work presented at ‘apiece’, the artist continue the visual language developed in her earlier exhibitions ‘Per ilga naktis’ (‘The Night Is Too Long’, 2023) and ‘Snūdas’ (‘Somnolence’, 2019), in which grasping, drooping, and frozen objects are suspended in time, indifferent to their surroundings yet creating an immersive and visually striking atmosphere.

The theme of laziness stands in contrast to the relentless urge many of us feel—to keep up, to be productive, to fulfill ourselves. It’s a state commonly associated with vice and often ridiculed. And although summer is a time when laziness is tolerated to a greater extent, everyone knows it’s only temporary. But what if laziness became a strategy?

Importantly, this theme and its motifs are of interest to Šnipaitė not from a social standpoint, but as a condition of one’s relationship with the environment. A lost glove resting on a fence post, a snowman enthusiastically shaped from clay (the nearest substitute for snow), its balls neatly stacked, drying laundry becoming a fragment of the colour landscape, frozen jets of a fountain. In these motifs, drawn as if from different seasons and combining irony with melancholy, the lazy figure is rehabilitated as a character, enclosed in a display for passers-by to observe.

Marija Šnipaitė (b. 1988) graduated with an MA in sculpture from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2014. In 2010, she undertook an internship at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design in Germany. Since 2016, she has been a member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artists’ Association. She has been participating in exhibitions in Lithuania and abroad since 2011 and has realised sculptures in public spaces.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė, Aušra Trakšelytė

Graphic design: Marek Voida

Photographer: Vytautas Narkevičius

Text translation: Martynas Galkus

Exhibition partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Exhibition open until 1 September 2025

On 17 June, Yeonsu Lim’s exhibition opens at the ‘apiece’, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

‘Bruit Secret’ (Vilnius edition) is an immersive sound-based installation by Yeonsu Lim, developed as an expansion of her 2023 graduation performance. Originally presented in a skate park in Kassel, Germany, the work has been recontextualised to suit the intimate space of ‘apiece’.

A drum set is wrapped in both transparent and opaque materials, transforming it into a sculptural object. Through this gesture, the artist visually evokes the presence of invisible sound, questioning how sensory experiences are constructed and distributed – and, further, to whom they are granted – through spatial conditions and structures of perceptual choice.

The title draws inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Bruit Secret’, reinterpreting the notion of ‘hidden sound’ within the contemporary context of spatial installation and performance. This artwork continues Lim’s investigation into the relationship between sound and silence in space. In the Vilnius edition, ‘Bruit Secret’ resonates with its specific environment and questions how this mediates the audience’s experience.

On 17 June at 7.00 pm, a live performance will take place during the exhibition opening, in which a drum set will be wrapped on site. Throughout the exhibition, a specially composed soundtrack titled  ‘Nightflight’ by the invited sound artist Young bin Noh will accompany the performance. After the live event, a different track,  ‘Dolus Eventualis’, will be available throughout the exhibition. Visitors can access it by scanning a QR code.

Yeonsu Lim (b. 1993, South Korea) is a Berlin-based artist working across sculpture, performance and installation. Her recent solo exhibitions were held in Barcelona and Kassel, and she has participated in international biennials since 2023. Her work was featured in ‘La Vanguardia’ during Barcelona Gallery Weekend 2024.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė and Aušra Trakšelytė

Graphic design: Marek Voida

Text translated by: Martynas Galkus

On 24 April, the single-artwork gallery ‘apiece’ presents ‘Subsurface’, a collaborative installation by Emilija Povilanskaitė and Clara Schweers. Known for their distinct yet complementary approaches to material, form, and symbolism, the artists come together in this new work to explore the tensions between technological, geological and biological fields.

The artists describe the concept and specifics of their new work as follows:

At the heart of the installation is an embryo – suspended, encased, and pulsing with energy. Like the Earth’s core beneath layers of shifting crust, it is held within a system of protective enclosures. The piece evokes a metaphor of geological and biological nesting: a womb within the earth, a nucleus inside a shell, life suspended in warmth and tension. A central, three-layered glass structure houses the embryo, glowing with neon gas that evokes the heat of magma, the radiance of the sun, and the spark of new life. Two vertical tubes extend from this core – vein-like or spinal – delivering rhythmic pulses of energy. These glowing arteries animate the form, suggesting a continuous cycle of breath, growth, and emergence.

The materials used in ‘Subsurface’ – glass, neon gas, silver coatings, white cables, and transformers – are recurring elements in the artists’ practice, combining organic imagery with technological mechanisms. Though the forms are crafted from traditional glass, they are far from static; they shift states, moving from transparent to reflective, from stillness to radiance. In other words, the sculpture operates as a living system, mirroring embryonic development, geological pressure, and electrical circulation. It invites reflection on containment and exposure, the unseen forces that nurture and protect, and the delicate balance between fragility and strength.

Emilija Povilanskaitė is a visual artist and film director. Her work – rooted in storytelling – is multifaceted, connecting technology, science, research and olfactory design. Through her immersive visual and olfactory installations and films, she explores the complexity of technology, fictional worlds and their effect on human perception.

Underpinned by a strong interest in myth-making and folklore, unexplained phenomena, and forgotten traditional rituals, the artist offers sensory paths that, through fiction and imagination, may allow us to reevaluate and reaffirm our place as sentient beings amidst the current socio-cultural conjuncture, which sees the cult of the image and the screen reign supreme.

In a time when the Internet has reinforced the hegemony of the image, Emilija uses her approach to create olfactory and visual spaces that communicate on an imaginary, multi-sensorial, and tangible level, making us the more aware of the (real) world which surrounds us, as well as the varying relationships we may entertain with it (whether in states of perceived danger, fear, or hallucination).

Clara Schweers (b. 1994) skillfully intertwines the digital with the tactile, pushing the boundaries of contemporary art and design. Her practice exists as a dialogue between the virtual and the tangible. This exploration began during her influential time at Design Academy Eindhoven. While there, she explored the capabilities and limitations of computer-generated forms. Her work transforms and reinterprets the movement of pre-modeled figures. It unveils new behavioural qualities that seem to emerge directly from their digital roots.

Within her work, Schweers harmoniously blends various mediums, including glass, ceramics, and the polished textures of digital renderings. Glass serves as a consistent element, guiding her exploration of fluidity and permanence.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė and Aušra Trakšelytė

Graphic design: Marek Voida

Text translated by: Martynas Galkus

Exhibition is financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. Exhibition open until 1 June 2025

On 6 March, Julija Pociūtė’s exhibition opens at the ‘apiece’, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

The work ‘Forest Border Line’ continues the artist’s recent research which explores various ways of establishing a connection with the forest and, in some cases, reflecting on the absence of such a connection. According to Pociūtė, she is interested in how a close relationship with nature fosters a deeper understanding of the environment, encourages new interpretations of human interaction with their surroundings, and how past events become an inseparable part of the landscape.

The installation at the ‘apiece’ gallery is a field study focusing on a Holocaust site in Kaišiadorys, on the edge of the Strošiūnai forest. During her research, the artist visited the site to collect organic materials, observed plants and trees, and documented them through photography.‘Forest Border Line’ is a visual narrative that weaves together an exploration of the Holocaust site, gathered and recorded materials, read and heard stories, and an experienced emotional response.

The installation features a metal structure with open ends, from which carved wooden pieces from the Strošiūnai Forest extend. A camouflage-like fabric, made from leftover leather scraps from label production, hangs from the structure. Plastic fragments, embedded in the fabric’s folds and coated with wood dust, mimic the texture of tree bark. Bringing together different materials, the artist invites the viewer to rethink fundamental ways of experiencing the environment, to understand the layers of human and natural reality, and their interconnections.

The title ‘Forest Border Line’ (in Lithuanian ‘Pamiškė’) was chosen as a reference to an in-between space that belongs neither to the settlement nor to the forest. Historical memory is central to the work, shaping people’s perception of their surroundings and their relationship with a place marked by a painful past.

Julija Pociūtė is an interdisciplinary artist known for her mixed media installations based on interaction between video art, sculpture, design elements and photography. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Lapland in Finland, where she focuses on the impact of mindfulness and art-based practices, collaboration with trees, and interconnection with the forest.

Major exhibitions: ‘BlackBox gallery’, Munich, Germany; ‘Toruń Centre for Contemporary Art’, Poland; ‘SIM Residency’, Reykjavík; ‘OSTRALE Biennial O21’, Dresden, Germany; Gallery LEVANT, Shanghai (China); ‘Kai Art Centre’, Tallinn; ‘Latvian National Museum’, Riga.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė and Aušra Trakšelytė

Graphic design: Marek Voida

Text translated by: Martynas Galkus

Exhibition partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture

Exhibition open until 18 April 2025

On 29 January, Mykolas Sauka’s exhibition opens at apiece, a gallery strategically focused on autonomous artistic expression.

For the past five years, Sauka’s creative focus and material of choice has been wood. “For me, wood evokes naivety, sanctity, cosiness, and Lithuanian baroque. It shapes the themes, and from them, day by day, an organised whole emerges,” says the artist. Using the exhibition space as a situational framework, the sculptor continually integrates new objects with earlier works, often reworking or adapting existing pieces until a cohesive composition of sculptural forms takes shape. He skilfully balances the scale of his works, drawing viewers into a multilayered visual world that stirs conflicting emotions: cosiness and chaos, security and unease, familiarity and an atmosphere of irony.

The exhibition at the apiece gallery reflects a contemporary society fixated on the cult of the idealised body. The pursuit of external beauty, perfection, and eternal youth reveal a state of inner conflict and discomfort with the naturally ageing body. The artist approaches wood as a metaphor for the body, treating it with the precision of a plastic surgeon—though his concern lies not with the beauty standards crafted by social media, advertisements, or films, but with their antithesis. As he explains, “I drive in pegs, glue things together, leave surfaces unpolished, and it shows.” The desire to depict imperfect bodies—or, in this case, body parts—is a gesture that empowers the artwork itself. Moreover, as the artist notes, “The sculpture becomes deformed due to my flawed anatomical knowledge and lack of skill. In other words, due to my naivety.”

The organised whole of body parts—hands, arms, feet, legs, torsos, and the body bacteria invisible to the naked eye, such as Demodex folliculorum—awakens imagination and curiosity in the context of the showcase-style gallery. Like a cabinet of curiosities filled with exotic artefacts (a kunstkabinett), it encourages us to “turn back” to none other than ourselves.

Mykolas Sauka (b. 1989) is a sculptor and writer. He completed his Master’s in Sculpture at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2014, and his work explores the identity of the contemporary human. In 2016, at the exhibition I Feel Watched by Another, he presented three-metre-high concrete sculptures realistically depicting naked elderly people. In 2023, he held a solo exhibition Children’s Room at the Vilnius Academy of Arts Exhibition Hall Titanikas, and in 2024, a show of the same name at Galerie Olivier Waltman in Paris, as part of the Lithuanian Season ’24 programme.

He was awarded the Kazimieras Barėnas Literary Prize in 2016 for his collection of short stories Grubiai (Roughly), and in 2024, he published his second book, Kambarys (A Room). He lives and works in Vilnius.

Exhibition curators: Milena Černiakaitė and Aušra Trakšelytė

Graphic design Marek Voida

Translation Martynas Galkus

Exhibition partly funded by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Exhibition open until 4 March 2025

More about the gallery apiece.lt

From November 24, the gallery apiece, located near the intersection of V. Kudirkos and M. K. Čiurlionio streets, will host an exhibition by New York-based Lithuanian artist Žilvinas Kempinas.

O2 is one of Kempinas’ early kinetic works from his ‘self-balancing sculpture’ series. While this piece has been exhibited in the past in traditional gallery settings against white walls, the vitrine-style apiece gallery provides the artist with the opportunity to realize his old idea: to install O2 by directing a fan and loop of magnetic tape toward the gallery’s glass façade (in this case frosted-matte) and illuminating the piece from the inside. This approach emphasizes only the shadow of the moving tape and removes the artwork’s physical components from the view – the fan and the loop of magnetic tape itself.

‘I see this new version of O2 as a step towards immateriality while still preserving its mechanics, as the installation can be viewed from the other side of the gallery,’ says Kempinas.

This new setting expands the associative field of O2, making the apiece gallery an integral part of the installation. The exhibition is accessible 24/7.

Žilvinas Kempinas (b. 1969) is one of the most renowned and internationally acclaimed Lithuanian contemporary artists. Based in New York since 1997, Kempinas creates installations, kinetic sculptures, and objects, as well as site-specific art projects. Since 1992, he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. Kempinas has received the Calder Prize (2007) and the Lithuanian National Prize for Culture and Art (2012), and represented Lithuania at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009).

Kempinas’ works are in the collections of major institutions, including the Pompidou Centre (Paris), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen), MO Museum (Vilnius), the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (Vilnius), JPMorgan Chase Art Collection (US), The Margulies Collection (US), Museo Jumex (Mexico City), and Collection Lambert (Avignon, France), among others.

More information about the artist: zilvinaskempinas.com

Curator: Aušra Trakšelytė
Communication: Menų Komunikacija
Translation: Alexandra Bondarev

The exhibition is partially supported by the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality. The exhibition will run until January 21, 2025.