Peaceful paradoxes of nature at Akvilė Anglickaitė’s exhibition hosted by the Radvila Palace Museum

Exhibition opening at 6 pm on Friday, 11 July, 2025

At 6 pm Friday, 11 July, the Radvila Palace Museum of Art of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA) opens a solo exhibition by Akvilė Anglickaitė Changing, It Rests. The artist uses photography, video and drawings to map her explorations of the constant variety of the world and of its phenomena.

 

„The long-awaited solo exhibition by Akvilė Anglickaitė Changing, It Rests reflects on perpetually-relevant ideas of time, memory, of transformation and constancy, and explores the complexity of man-nature relationship. At the same time, the exhibition celebrates the spirit of summer, invites its visitors to rest, to slow down, to delve into meditative contemplation of the nature’s fragments captured in the artworks, and to experience how it changes with seasons, remaining also majestically solid,” Justina Augustytė, director of the Radvila Palace Museum, says. 

 

Constant flux and stability as the centre of the exhibition

The Radvila Palace Museum will showcase analogue photography, video and drawings – the artwork produced by the artist specially for this exhibition over the course of several years. These pieces posit man as both, a central and peripheral figure of nature.  In the structure of the display and in the motifs of the artwork, one can discern a circle which then turns into a maze, leading the viewer until they slowly get lost or come back where they started, continue circling around, thus echoing the cyclic character of nature and of human life. 

The title of the exhibition, borrowed by the artist from the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’s (500 BC) Fragments, serves to highlight the paradoxicality of the world and its phenomena, namely, its continuous flux and unity. “The line from Heraclitus “Changing, It Rests” attracted me due to its inherent logical contradiction. At the same time, it opened the door into a space where contradictions coexist. The way they do in nature.  The return to views of nature in art was unexpected to me, but I embraced the adventure. I experienced it as coming back to the unknown beginnings which seem to repeat themselves incessantly – just as the pleasure of gazing at the flames or the flowing water, again and again,” Anglickaitė shares how her theme emerged.     

 

Dialogues with the culture of the past and the intuitions of future

The narrative of the exhibition branches into several themes developing as distinct melodies. The colour photography images produced using analogue technology show views of nature. For the artist it is like coming back to the very foundations of photography, back to the predigital era, when images were produced as light and chemistry came into contact. Actually, it is light – filtering through the thick foliage, sliding across the leaves and stalks, shining in dew drops and shimmering on the rippling water expanses – that becomes the main protagonist of these pictures. At the same time, the artist enters into a dialogue with the visual tradition of the past dominated by views of nature, and invites to consider what they can (or cannot) speak about today.

The human experience of time and the fragments of memories are inserted into nature’s eternal time as captured in the videos, hinting at how everything repeats itself – and keeps changing. These motifs extend into abstract large-scale drawings in maze-like lines suggesting of nature’s forms and patterns – wood grain, water pools, geological maps, cells and embryos. The observation and recording of natural shapes, using different means of expression, become to the artist a way to reflect the man-nature relationship in constant flux and to alert to the precariousness of its stability and the need to preserve it for the future. 

The exhibition will be accompanied by education activities adjusted to groups of different age and needs by the education specialists of the Radvila Palace Museum, also, by meetings with the artist and artist-guided tours. 

 

Akvilė Anglickaitė’s Changing, It Rests opens at 6 pm, 11 July, at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art (Vilniaus g. 24, Vilnius) of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (LNMA). The exhibition is on until 12 October. 

 

Akvilė Anglickaitė (b. 1982) is a Lithuanian interdisciplinary artist based in Vilnius. In 2017, she defended her doctoral thesis in the arts at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She has taken part in group exhibitions in Lithuania, Switzerland, Poland, United Kingdom, South Korea, Taiwan, has given solo exhibitions and realised projects in Vilnius, Amsterdam, Jerusalem.  In 2014, her documentary In the Depths of Lakes was awarded the Prize of Petras Abukevičius as the best film on the theme of nature. 

 

Exhibition artist Akvilė Anglickaitė 

Exhibition text author Tomas Genevičius 

Exhibition architect Mindaugas Reklaitis 

Coordinating architect Aleksandras Kavaliauskas  

Graphic designer Marius Žalneravičius 

 

Organised by Radvila Palace Museum of the LNMA

Project financed by Lithuanian Council for Culture

Supporter Vilnius Academy of Arts

 

 

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Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824

See also

Exhibition

Akvilė Anglickaitė. Changing, It Rests