Mother of Pearl
Benediktas Marija Žukas
08.11.2025. - 20.12.2025

The modern visual landscape is overstimulated and oversaturated, and our eyes have adapted to constant motion scrolling past images without lingering. The average smartphone user is scrolling through 300 feet of news feed a day, the height of the Statue of Liberty. Moreover, five billion people around the world are on social media in this restless, flickering space with the average user online for about three hours a day.*

By its very nature, abstract painting refuses to depict “things” or “narratives”; its aim is to perceive the underlying emotion, revealing rhythm, tension, silence, breath. It simplifies form down to the level, where shape and colour become mood, memory, an imprint of experience. It invites us to let go of the immediate need to understand and instead surrender to what emerges when we allow our gaze to linger.

In an age of perfectionism, we strive to be correct, seeking the right formulas, safety, certainty. The popular social media phrase “felt cute, might delete later” reveals the fragile balance between the willingness to share and the fear of being judged. The works by Benediktas Marija Žukas resist this logic; they do not explain or present a single clear emotion (or an answer), they open a space where uncertainty becomes freedom and looking becomes an event. Splashes, strokes, lines - fine and thick, the density or rhythm of paint serve as a map that refuses to give the viewer a clear direction.

What happens when we truly look, without trying to find a meaning right away? Mother of Pearl becomes a metaphor for such a moment. Looking itself can become a space of creation, both literally and internally, a place of transformation where each moment of seeing/ watching/ observing is a new beginning.

It’s been said that a work of art that truly speaks to you may just reveal more about you than about its creator.

Benediktas Marija Žukas (b. 1992, Vilnius), a Lithuanian artist representing a new wave of abstraction, engages with process-based painting and the affective potential of color, form, and materiality. Žukas’ works reveal a dynamic interplay between gesture and geography, alive with movement, tension, and an unselfconscious sense of wonder. Žukas holds Master’s degree in painting from Vilnius Academy of Arts and has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions in Antwerp(Conscience 20 and Gert Voorjans galleries) and Vilnius (Contemporary Art Gallery Meduza and Vladas Vildžiūnas Art Gallery), as well as in group exhibitions in Lithuania and Belgium. This marks the artists first solo exhibition in Latvia.

*Association for Psychological Science. October 3, 2024