Where Art Invites to Linger: Rothko Museum Announces Winter Exhibition Season
At 4 p.m. on Friday, 5 December, the Rothko Museum will open its winter season with five new exhibitions exploring humour, presence, technology, and the shifting nature of contemporary experience. From introspective painting and dreamlike landscapes to porcelain shaped by both hand and machine, the season brings together voices from Lithuania and beyond, offering viewers a contemplative passage through the winter months.
Meda Norbutaitė – Wedge
Lithuanian artist, curator, and educator Meda Norbutaitė uses irony and grotesque to probe the social anxieties of contemporary life – our fears and expectations, jealousies and insecurities, inflated egos and self-doubt. Humour becomes both her language and her lens for exploring the dilemmas of today’s masked and performative self.
Art researcher Dr. Evelina Januškaitė observes: “In an age when social media offers almost endless channels for connection and floods our vision with images, Norbutaitė’s clowning becomes a wedge – a means to prise open the rigid frames that confine us so we can laugh at ourselves and rediscover a sense of freedom. Spanning the full range of emotion, the exhibition invites us to recognise and awaken the clown within – the self that reflects, opens up, critiques, loves, plays, errs, dares, and begins again.”
Solveiga Gutautė – Genius Loci
Lithuanian painter Solveiga Gutautė creates atmospheric spaces where shadow, silence, and quivering light become experiences in themselves. Unfolding on the threshold between day and dusk, dream and awareness, memory and today, her “shadow painting” is influenced by the meditative rhythms of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s music and invites viewers into a slower, more intuitive mode of perception.
The project’s curator Māris Čačka calls the exhibition a soft yet powerful reminder that “art does not need to be understood. It is enough to let it happen and to linger, for a while, within its quiet breath.”
Rokas Dovydėnas – Porcelain and the Machine
Doctor of Arts, interdisciplinary artist and curator Rokas Dovydėnas, Lithuania, traces European porcelain’s evolving language across three centuries, focusing on the meeting of traditional craftsmanship with contemporary digital solutions. Drawing on historical vase forms and the inventive spirit of pioneers like Johann Friedrich Böttger, he asks how porcelain’s meaning shifts when the hand yields part of its authority to algorithmic design and robotic fabrication.
“Using Limoges porcelain fired at 1250°C, my works follow the blanc-de-Chine tradition of white vessels with transparent glaze. Yet their creation belongs to a new era: designed with computer modelling and produced by 3D clay printers, they embody the meeting of centuries-old material with robotic precision,” the artist says.
Diana Rudokienė – Dream Topographies
Lithuanian artist Diana Rudokienė explores the fragile boundary between the visible and the unseen, guided by an enduring fascination with memory, transformation, and the subconscious. Using translucent layers of oil and subtle tonal shifts, she creates dreamlike spaces where figures dissolve into atmosphere and light, suggesting inner landscapes shared across human experience.
“In the half-light between sleep and waking, images surface – shifting, dissolving, reappearing. Painting becomes a map of the unseen, tracing the delicate borders between dream and perception. In mapping my dream topographies, I invite viewers to recognise fragments of their own,” the artist notes.
Tensions and Transitions: Navigating the Boundaries of Being
Produced by Pashmin Art Consortia, Germany, the exhibition brings together Zhang Dawo, Peter Backhaus, Horst Wagner, Fant Wenger, Reinhard Hanke, Holger Dempwolff, Sonia Parchet, and Anna van den Hövel – eight artists whose works reflect the emotional and spiritual transitions of our rapidly changing world. Blending abstraction, expressionism, and a sense of the transcendent, the exhibition invites viewers to consider the shifting boundaries of personal and collective identity and to reflect on the struggles of modern existence – alienation, pursuit of meaning, and thirst for connection.
Exhibition Dates and Opening Night
The Rothko Museum’s winter season runs from 5 December 2025 to 8 February 2026. At the same time, until 1 February 2026, visitors can still enjoy two autumn season’s exhibitions – “Martinsons Award 2025” and “Matchstick in the Sand” by Milena Pirštelienė, Lithuania.
Admission to the new exhibitions is free on opening night.
The Rothko Museum’s winter exhibition season was prepared in partnership with the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Ceramics and Pashmin Art Consortia, with valued support from the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia, Daugavpils City Council, Panevėžys City Municipality Cultural and Art Grant, and “Caparol”.
Publicity images:
1. Meda Norbutaitė. Vignette. Pie to the Face. Oil on canvas. 150 x 200 cm. 2022
2. Solveiga Gutautė. Untitled. Oil on canvas. 200 × 286 cm. 2025
3. Rokas Dovydėnas. A Meiping Vase. Porcelain, glaze, 3D printing. 2024
4. Diana Rudokienė. Twilight. Oil and gold foil on canvas. 80 x 160 cm. 2024
5. Holger Dempwolff. Mr Smith Walking on the Seaground. Oil on canvas, 100 x 70 cm
