Pamario Gallery starts its summer season with the exhibitions about cats and lions and holiday illusions
Exhibition opening at 6 pm Friday, 5 June, 2026
Friday, 5 June, at 6 pm, the Pamario Gallery of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art (L. Rėzos St 3, Juodkrantė) opened two exhibitions ushering in the LNMA summer season. They invite to look at animals in art – from fluffy cats to the lions on holidays that turn surreal.
“Yearly, we offer two theme-linked events, and this time we turn to at the world of animals, from the primates to cat-inspired images. We invite to escape the hectic routines and daily information flow and discover a peaceful time at Juodkrantė coastal resort where we have put together a collection of top-quality art and a delicate portion of humour,” Skaistė Marčienė, director of Pamario Gallery invites to the museum’s summer events.
Between the purring grace and grandeur – cats and lions in art
The exhibition “Some Cats are Lions” features two subfamilies of one family Panthera leo and Felis catus, 10 lions and 23 cats. Works of professional art and folk-art meet here to relate the same story. Some of them evoke tenderness and coziness, others – power, courage and distinction – just like cats or lions do. A part of the works on display come from the LNMA’s collections, included are also new works by folk artists as well as pieces of contemporary professional art.
The first impression is that professional artists tend to render lions in a detailed and monumental manner, while their cats, to the contrary, are captured in a few deft lines. Folk artists seem to be partial to cats as subjects, their images are rendered with more love, while lions seldom feature in their pieces. This contrast is also about the two cultural realms – the high art traditionally is about representation, the symbols of power and grandeur, with mundane life receding to the background. Folk art, to the contrary, celebrates simple daily life, immediate environment and routine rhythms.
But the exhibition seems to erase these boundaries – at least, it brings together the lions by folk-artisans and the cats by professional artists. And, indeed, it is not only about animals, but also about us: our relations to power, the mundane and the images we want to present.
„The putting together of the exhibition can be described as a string of unexpected discoveries, accordingly, I expect this exhibition to also become a pleasant surprise to the viewers. I wanted it to be playful and appealing to children as well. Even a cat, should one step in by chance, should feel home at the exhibition. I thought about the holidayers strolling along the waterfront. This exhibition is for them – the locals of Neringa, the holiday makers and cats,” says the curator Tomas Daukša. His advice to the viewers is instead of trying to follow a story, just enjoy the cats squatting in the gallery and play with the ball of yarn, as it rolls different sides and each time can display a different end of yarn.
Donatas Jankauskas-Duonis’s “Boniface’s Holiday”: exotic holidays and critique of the beauty industry
The exhibition borrows its title of “Boniface’s Holiday” from the 60s animation film about a lion named Boniface who dreams of rest, but his vacations turn into work of entertaining children with circus tricks. It becomes an allusion to many holidays that are constantly interrupted by work, duty and the expectations of those around us.
To produce a magic holiday vibe, the artist displays, splashed across a large screen, a view of an exotic beach, which lures to delve into its hypnotizing blue waters. The zoomorphic figures displayed next to it – cyclopes, monkeys, gorillas, and a blue bird, as well as the cats reminiscent of lions, showcased in an adjacent building, serve to intensify the surrealist impression of adventure.
The sculptor Donatas Jankauskas-Duonis is known on the contemporary Lithuanian art scene through his irony, grotesque and playful cultural references. “I keep dreaming of a Sunday which extends into holidays,” the artist jokes. The exotic holiday atmosphere betrays the artist’s irony towards the cult of beauty and the attempts of keeping with the Joneses. His work reflects the impact of the beauty industry on humans. The visitors will be able not only see how the primates turn into fancy dandies, but try sitting in a barber’s chair, thus becoming part of the playful story – for a short while. Story-telling, the elements of the fantastic and fiction in general – are other no less important thematic threads of the “Boniface’s Holiday”.
The invitation for a playful time among cats and lions, together with Boniface on his surreal holidays – and for the contemplation of the mundane, of power and the images we project – is open in Juodkrantė for the rest of the summer. Both events will run until 27 September, accompanied by an education programme, posted on the LNMA website and the Pamario Gallery social media.
3 L. Rėzos st, LT-93101, Juodkrantė, Neringa, Lithuania.
+370 469 53 323, +370 46 410 412
pamario.galerija@lndm.lt
