Image: Lithuanian National Museum of Art
The Lithuanian National Museum of Art will open a major exhibition of Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus at the Vytauto Kasiulis Art Museum in Vilnius on 2 July 2026 at 6 pm. Titled ‘Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus. Visata iš spiralės’, the show is presented as the first comprehensive display in Lithuania of the artist’s work, brought from Colombia and introduced through more than 200 works spanning sculpture, painting, graphic art and drawing.
According to the museum, the exhibition draws on a body of work donated to Lithuania by the artist’s family. The collection arrived in Klaipėda’s seaport earlier this year after travelling thousands of kilometres from Šivickas de Mockus’s studio in Bogotá. The museum said the donation consists of 209 works and marks one of the most significant additions to its collections in recent years. The exhibition is being organized by the Vytauto Kasiulio Art Museum, a branch of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art focused on Lithuanian diaspora art.
Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus was born in 1925 in Kėdainių district, near the Nevėžis river. The museum traces her path from childhood in interwar Lithuania to displacement during the Second World War, when she left for Germany in 1944 with her sister Aldona. There she worked in a metal-processing factory, continued drawing, and was later admitted to the Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts. In Germany she met the Lithuanian Alfonso Mockus; the couple moved to Bogotá in 1950, where she began working as an illustrator.
The museum’s account says her first solo exhibition, held in 1955 at the National Library of Colombia, received positive attention, but she continued searching for a language that felt fully her own. She found that answer in clay, which shaped the rest of her career. After learning ceramic techniques through the Lithuanian artist Juozas Bagdonas, she developed distinctive sculptural forms. Following the death of her husband in 1966, she founded the ‘AkmuO’ workshop, which became an important centre for design, crafts and artistic work while she raised her daughter Ismena and son Antanas.
Over more than six decades of work, Šivickas de Mockus mounted more than 20 solo exhibitions and took part in over 100 group exhibitions in countries around the world, the museum said. Her practice was shaped by pre-Columbian art and gradually moved away from the expressionist style of her early years toward a personal world of organic forms and symbols. The exhibition text describes recurring motifs such as moons, fissures, riverbeds and depressions, alongside an approach marked by vision, expression, inner freedom and close attention to material.
Museum director Ilona Mažeikienė said the institution is honoured to present the work of an émigré woman artist distinguished by visionary thinking and expression, and curator Laura Moreno Barbosa has framed the exhibition as a cyclical, spiral-like encounter between cultures. The museum said the exhibition will run at the Vytauto Kasiulis Art Museum until 7 February 2027, with tours, educational activities and related events to be announced on the LNDM website and social media channels.
