Photo reportage from the exhibition 'Vilnius’ Children' by Benediktas Marija Žukas at Medūza

March 16, 2025
Author Echo Gone Wrong

Published in Photo / Video from Lithuania

'Talking Heads' 152 x 152 cm Oil, enamel, spray paint on canvas, 2024

The exhibition ‘Vilnius’ Children’ by Benediktas Marija Žukas runs at Medūza until 29 March.

When, in one of his fragments, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg urged children to be “educated in such a way that everything unclear would remain entirely incomprehensible to them,” he likely did not intend to further complicate their already intricate lives. Rather, he sought to encourage them not to let the old order of things stifle their ability to imagine something new. After all, the most radical question of childhood is not how to inherit the world as it is, but how to see what it could yet become.

Could it be that the impulse for artistic creation, as we understand it today, stems from this same childlike concern for the future? Like children, artists are united by their faith in the power of images and by the hope that the materiality of the world can change along with its aesthetic form. For instance, when, in the 1920s, the voices of Vytautas Kairiūkštis, Władysław Strzemiński, and other representatives of the “new art” movement in Vilnius called to “not inherit the old, but to invent the new,” Kazys Binkis proclaimed himself a “rascal” and declared that it was “through art that the face of the present will become our own.”

Encounters with works of art constantly reignite the tension between what has been inherited and taken for granted, and what remains unexplored and even unrecognizable. Our gaze resists the unknown of abstraction, guided by a strong expectation to recognize a once seen figure, to discern a familiar form or motif. And yet, if we wish to see something anew, we must learn to let images “outpace” us and allow ourselves to perceive the world as something entirely incomprehensible.

The exhibition Vilnius’ Children presents new and previously unseen paintings by Benediktas Marija Žukas, exploring this tension between abstract imagery and recognizable form, between “the inherited old and the invented new.” In the artist’s paintings, individual painterly expression becomes a dynamic field of tensions, where imagery inherited from art history unfolds as an undefined horizon of creative possibility.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Benediktas Marija Žukas (b. 1992) is an artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania, who rethinks the notions of abstraction and artistic tradition in painting. A graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a Master’s degree in painting, he has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions in Antwerp (Conscience 20 and Gert Voorjans galleries) and Vilnius (Vladas Vildžiūnas Art Gallery), as well as in group exhibitions in Lithuania and Belgium.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The exhibition organizers sincerely thank everyone whose work and thoughts contributed

to its realization. The artist would like to express special gratitude to Austėja Kuktaitė for her support and critical perspective. This exhibition would not have been possible without the generous financial support of the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

Photography: Laurynas Skeisgiela