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
Text translation: Martynas Galkus
Exhibition partly funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
Exhibition open until 1 September 2025
More about the gallery: apiece.lt
