Medūza is pleased to present Seasons — a solo exhibition by Donatas Jankauskas–Duonis. This ambitious and complex installation was created specifically for the gothic vaults beneath the gallery, where the artist’s distinctive sculptural imagery playfully draws viewers in with humour and (auto)irony, motifs of personal experience, and a critical yet wondrous vision of the contemporary world. One might imagine a similarly modern gaze in the eyes of Late Palaeolithic artists as they scratched animal silhouettes onto the walls of Lascaux, then watched the beasts come alive in the flicker of campfire shadows.

The underground spaces, dating back to the 16th century, were once part of Radvila the Black’s palace ensemble. On the occasion of this exhibition, they are open to visitors for the very first time. Seasons by Donatas Jankauskas–Duonis also inaugurates a new cycle of slow, year-long exhibitions at Medūza.

Seasons — almost a pun in itself — connects the contradictory experiences through which we sense time. Here, the seasonal character of “nature” is juxtaposed with the seasonality of fashion and popular culture, dictated less by archaic cycles of death and rebirth than by the accelerating rhythms of production and consumption. This dissonance between temporal regimes finds form in 18 monumental reliefs installed across the labyrinthine corridors and interconnected underground chambers. While these sculptural interventions do not present a unifying narrative, they evoke the artist’s ironic, yet often painfully sharp insights into human–animal relations, daydreams, and the needs and desires that drive them.

At the same time, Seasons is a critical gesture that questions the idea of an opus magnum and the romantic myth of genius. The trope of an artwork encapsulating the four seasons — familiar from canonical works by Vivaldi, Donelaitis, Čiurlionis, among many others — represents perhaps the clearest expression of the notion that through artistic technique nature itself, like in a mirror, ought to recognise its own fulfillment in the artwork. Yet in Jankauskas–Duonis’s exhibition, both the romantic myth of the creative “genius” and the dream of an absolute work of art — one that could supposedly transcend the boundaries between art and life, technology and nature — are reconfigured. Here, it is not nature reflected in human craft, but the artist recognising himself as an ape: confused, vulnerable, mute, yet still grasping for speech.

In Seasons, the ape — by now a recurring icon in Jankauskas–Duonis’s imagery — is not simply a mischievous shapeshifter, nor merely an autobiographical motif. Instead, it emerges as a dialectical image, holding together contradictions embedded in Lithuania’s social transformation — at once hopeful and painful, deliberate and inevitable — that began in the 1990s and continue to this day.

Donatas Jankauskas–Duonis (b. 1968) is a Lithuanian contemporary artist working across sculpture, installation, video, performance, and theatre. A graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts (1994), he has exhibited widely in Lithuania and abroad since the early 1990s. His works are held in the Lithuanian National Museum of Art, MO Museum, and installed in public spaces including Sapiega Park, Paupys, and the Contemporary Art Centre’s Sculpture Yard. He teaches at the J. Vienožinskis Art School in Vilnius and in 2021 opened the Monkey Museum in Savičiūnai, dedicated to his collection of monkey-themed works.


We extend our heartfelt thanks to everyone whose work and ideas contributed to the realisation of this exhibition. Special thanks to Bartas Jankauskas for his support and helping hands; Justė Tarasovaitė for 3D graphics; Vaidas Lekevičius for moving images; Džiugas Jankūnas for collaboration; Lida Dubauskienė for the printed monkey; Irena Adomaitienė for patiently managing the budget lines; Arūnas Lazauskas and his team for keeping things clean; Jurgis Paškevičius and Gediminas G. Akstinas for the railings; Tomas Meleška for his generous assistance; Juozas Lukaitis for installing electricity; and Eglė Gandė Bogdanienė together with the Lithuanian Artists’ Association for their support and trust.

This exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of the Lithuanian Council for Culture. We also thank the Monkey Museum.

                                                                                                             












































︎︎︎ Atgal