Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus. The Universe from a Spiral

2 July – 7 February, 2027

Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus (1925–2018) was a Colombian artist of Lithuanian descent whose life and work spanned the dramatic historical turning points of the 20th century, the experience of emigration, and a unique artistic path. 

Born in the Kėdainiai district, near the Nevėžis River, she grew up in independent Lithuania, but her youth was marked by the events of World War II and the Nazi and Soviet occupations. She attended school in Kėdainiai, Raseiniai, and Panevėžys, where she also began taking painting lessons. In 1944, as the second Soviet occupation approached, she fled to Germany with her sister Aldona. There she worked in a metalworking factory, but even under difficult conditions, she never stopped drawing and sketching; she was later admitted to the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart. During her studies, influenced by postwar European artistic ideas and the revival of the Bauhaus tradition, she created drawings, portraits, landscapes, and her first more abstract works. 

 

While living in Germany, Nijolė met Alfonsas Mockus, a Lithuanian who became her husband. In 1950, the couple emigrated to Colombia and settled in Bogotá. During her first years there, the artist worked as an illustrator, creating more than 150 illustrations for major Colombian magazines and newspapers. In 1955, her first solo exhibition, held at the National Library of Colombia, received positive reviews from critics, but the artist herself felt she had not yet found her own artistic voice. The result of her search was clay – a material that would define all of her subsequent creative work. After being introduced to ceramic techniques by the Lithuanian artist Juozas Bagdonas, she began creating not only utilitarian objects but also distinctive sculptural forms. 

 

After her husband’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1966, Nijolė took sole responsibility for her daughter Ismena and son Antanas. The “AkmuO” studio that she founded became a significant centre for design, crafts, and artistic creation. The studio produced ceramics, metal items, furniture, chandeliers, and decorative objects, but over time, individual artistic expression came to play an increasingly important role. From the beginning of the 1970s, she turned more decisively toward the visual arts, and her creative work began to be dominated by organic, nature-inspired forms – moons, gaps, riverbeds, angles, indentations, and their interconnections in space. Exhibitions held from the 1980s in Colombia, as well as in Venezuela, Ecuador, Australia, France, and Germany revealed a mature phase in the artist’s work, in which sculptures and objects merged into spatial compositions, which the artist herself referred to as installations. Over more than six decades of her creative work, Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus has held more than twenty solo exhibitions and participated in over a hundred group exhibitions in various countries worldwide. Her oeuvre is distinguished by its visionary thinking, expressiveness, inner freedom, a sensitive relationship with the medium, and a reflection on universal human experiences. The artist left behind a rich legacy of drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations that blend the cultural experiences of Lithuania, Europe, and Latin America. She is today regarded as one of the most important artists of Lithuanian origin in Latin America and a significant figure in the cultural history of the Lithuanian diaspora. Laura Moreno Barbosa, a scholar of Nijolė’s artistic legacy and curator of the exhibition, encourages viewers to develop their own perspective on the artist’s work, perceiving it as a cyclical and spiralling phenomenon. 

 

 

In 2026, the family of Nijolė Šivickas donated to Lithuania a portion of her artistic heritage, comprising 209 artworks—sculptures, paintings, graphic works, and drawings—from different stages of her creative career. The collection was transported from Bogotá and reached the Port of Klaipėda in the second half of January. 

 

 

Organiser Vytauto Kasiulio dailės muziejus

Supporter Lietuvos kultūros taryba

Media Partners: LRT, JCDecaux

Curator Laura Moreno Barbosa

Architect Tomas Valentinaitis, RESH | Architecture & Design

Designer Ula Šimulynaitė

Translators: Eglė Ozolinčiūtė, Aleksandra Fominaitė

Copy editors: Ieva Puluikienė, Ilona Čiužauskaitė

Conservators: Paulius Zovė, Lukas Rakauskas, Algis Vaineikis, Eglė Piščikaitė

Coordinators: Ilona Mažeikienė, Birutė Pankūnaitė

 

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1 Goštauto st, Vilnius, Lithuania
+370 5 261 6764.
kasiulio.muziejus@lndm.lt