Mindaugas Navakas. Yesterday and Long Before. 2026 04 02–08 02
2 April – 2 August, 2026
After nearly five years, Mindaugas Navakas returns to the Radvila Palace with a new exhibition, Yesterday and Long Before, presenting several dozen of his latest monumental porcelain sculptures, a number of which are being exhibited for the first time.
Throughout his career, the artist has maintained a critical and frequently ironic relationship with the environment around us, yet his plastic expression, though already widely recognisable, continues to evolve. His practice has consistently pursued experimentation with sculptural techniques and materials – from traditional raw materials such as metal, wood, and stone, to readymades and objets trouvés. In Yesterday and Long Before, Mindaugas Navakas continues to experiment, working with hard-paste porcelain and shaping its surface using standard, commonplace construction materials, thereby pointing to economic, social, and cultural differences between East and West. In China, for instance, porcelain is associated with decorative vases, dinner services, and tableware, whereas in the West it is widely used for sanitary ware and forms part of hygiene infrastructure.
The porcelain used by the artist was supplied from a factory in the city of Sloviansk, in the Donetsk region, a factory that no longer operates due to the war. The exhibition activates cultural and historical, as well as current geopolitical contexts of porcelain, functioning as a retrospective of a single creative cycle. It is no coincidence that Mindaugas Navakas’s exhibition Yesterday and Long Before is presented in the great hall of the southern wing of the Radvila Palace Museum of Art – the very part of the palace that remained unbuilt until the early 20th century due to recurring military conflicts. Within this space, stripped of any pretension to luxury, porcelain rethinks the relationship with history and time, dispersing the myth of longing for a palatial splendour.
Organiser: LNMA Radvila Palace Museum of Art
Curator: Viltė Visockaitė
Architect: Aleksandras Kavaliauskas
Graphic designer: Domantas Pigulevičius
Radvila Palace Museum of Art,
24 Vilniaus st, LT-01402, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 250 5824
