The Sapiegas Palace opens its doors to a solo exhibition by Mindaugas Navakas, one of the most famous Lithuanian sculptors. The exhibition intersects the vectors of Baroque and contemporary Western and Chinese cultures. The hard porcelain in Navakas's paintings, which once shone magnificently in the menus of noblemen's and empresses' palaces in the form of vases, servers, and furnishings, is nowadays most often seen in toilets and bathrooms in the West. Toilets, urinals and washbasins made of it have become attributes and symbols of personal and communal hygiene. Despite its hardness, durability and resilience, porcelain is generally associated with delicacy and luxury, and with China's and, at the same time, Europe's distinguished past. The sculptor's large-scale works refer not only to the changing range of meanings and associations of materiality, but also to shifts in the global vertical of power and value, where a material that once embodied nobility and prestige has been transformed into the basis of sanitary ware.
Navak's porcelain is sourced from Slovyansk, Ukraine. Of the French and Australian porcelain available in Lithuania, Ukrainian porcelain is the cheapest. When starting to create a porcelain sculpture, the artist chooses a plastic splinter, folds it, makes a plaster cast and starts to shape the object. The lumps, grooves and wrinkles visible on the surface of the sculptures are not the result of the artist's handiwork, but rather another imitation. Navak is bluffing and, unlike the old masters who carefully worked out every detail of the piece, he creates his works with his bare hands, as is typical of his brutal practice, but rough, based on a brutal industrial process. The cheap building materials that dominate the exhibition, including Ukrainian porcelain, as well as pedestals made of textiles and plastics, point to the mechanical creation of contemporary high culture by the cheapest possible means. On the other hand, the marble pedestals in the exhibition are a reminder of the foundations of a great European culture, on which the Baroque palace of the Sapiegas was once built.
The porcelain that is returning to the Sapiegas Palace after a couple of centuries is no longer the same as what the owners of this palace would have remembered it as. Neither is the new culture it represents. In Navakas's work, one can see a fish, a symbol of the Christian world, Egyptian sarcophagi, alien cocoons and vases reminiscent of baroque desserts. Navak's monumentality goes hand in hand with humour. Perhaps that is why his Porcelain for the Palace can be received as an ironic gift, a joke about a grand but illusory past. Navak says: "Sculpture is an artistic medium that requires the least imagination to understand. It is more here and now than drawing, painting or poetry." What viewers and spectators see here and now is the fantasy of an innovative Lithuanian artist, who once again surprises with his unique ability to weave a conversation between form, material and culture.
