Evaldas Jansas. Extrapolation
24 July–26 October, 2025
‘With plastic arts, you can express everything immediately, throw everything at the viewer in one go […] What I’m trying to say is that I don’t intellectualise my works, I don’t try to hide my idea, I seek clarity and state my thoughts in a way that is easy to understand even for an uneducated viewer.’
Evaldas Jansas
Evaldas Jansas broke into the Lithuanian visual arts scene in a spectacular manner in the early 1990s, at the dawn of Lithuanian independence and a time of rampant capitalism, with his ‘impact’ objects, brutal performances, bold actions, ‘rough’ installations, videos that immerse viewers into the thick of it, and other works, cutting deep ‘wounds in the (imaginary) body of Lithuanian art history as if with a shard of a broken bottle.
Evaldas Jansas is one of a few artists who have become household names. More than just a restless bohemian soul, he is the enfant terrible of the turn-of-the-century contemporary art system in Vilnius and a prominent interdisciplinarian. Jansas is also a sociocultural phenomenon, a legend and an icon symbolising broken aesthetic and social conventions, artistic transgressions, and various (im)possible other liminal experiences that the so-called ‘respectable society’ tends to ignore.
Thus, the audience’s ‘aesthetic taste’ and overall nervous system are in for a serious stress-test through an encounter with a unique kind of beauty of gritty mundanity that develops into aggressive sociability and self-harm, with the naked body and its fluids, and even with ‘art objects’ matured inside the artist’s intestines! There will also be sarcastic cultural references in post-punk paintings and self-portraits balancing on the edge between caricature and tastelessness, saturated with both harsh (self-)deprecation and honest, aching self-reflection.
This exhibition claims to be a retrospective of Evaldas Jansas, summarising over three decades of creative work. It is laid out into three decades (or ‘Jansas Epochs’): 1993–2003, 2004–2014 and 2014−2025. However, such a museological/chronological structure is by no means straightforward or obvious. It is ‘dissolved’ in impulsive fluctuations, subjectivised through diary-like (in)consistencies, eclectic yet shaken together into a hard-hitting cocktail.
On the one hand, it is an autobiography as told by the artist, because Jansas’s works emerge from situations in everyday life. This is why the artist’s work can also be seen as a mirror to independent Lithuania and the genesis of its contemporary art. On the other hand, Jansas appears to have succeeded in distilling a certain ‘psycho-aesthetic condensate’ in his work, as if an ‘essence’ that elevates the works from being mere artefacts of an era. Jansas’s work is steeped in being: it is not only actively engaged in a conversation with the present but also rooted in the future.
Kęstutis Šapoka
Extrapolation*
* An application of past experience to predict unknown (future) phenomena, assuming that conditions will remain largely unchanged.
Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824
