Galerija Vartai presents Mercy, a joint exhibition by Zlatko Kopljar and Luc Tuymans,

arranged as a sequence of shared and separate displays highlighting the iconoclasm

and analytical complexity of these two artists. The exhibition juxtaposes Tuymans’

recent work in animation, where the influential painter has continuously expanded the

conceptual scope of his practice, with a selection of works created by Kopljar

throughout the last decades, combining performance, sculpture, video, and

experimental cinema.

The title Mercy is a plea. It presupposes an urgent need and a fundamental lack,

situating the exhibition as an effect of loss and detachment manifested by Kopljar’s

K20 Empty (2015) and Tuymans’ Monkeys (2021), which occupy the exhibition’s first

room.

K20 Empty consists of two concrete cast miniatures depicting the buildings of New

York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and London’s Tate Modern. Stuffing the two

buildings in concrete to conceal their inner spaces and the art they are expected to

display, K20 Empty modifies the museum, transforming it from a site of display into an

anonymous material, a depleted code. In the work, the museums reappear as

souvenirs, reminders of history. By miniaturizing the two museums, the work signifies

their future as past, an image of both commemoration and annihilation.  

On the wall in front of the entrance hangs a cluster of Tuymans’ drawings used for his

animation film Monkeys. In the film, a mechanical toy monkey holding cymbals moves

back and forth within a flickering dark space before being consumed by black fire. The

disintegration of Monkeys into its single frames follows the logic of Tuymans’ painterly

practice, which dissociates film stills and photographic records to manually produce

superfluous, exhausted images, whose diluted chromatics and congealed texture

mark them as obsolete, a mute appearance of an irretrievable time and place.

Tuymans’ interest in fragmentary, obscured, drained images stems from his radical

notion of historical representation, and, in particular, from his approach towards the

subject matter of the Second World War, as already demonstrated in several early,

seminal paintings informed by absence, void, and indistinctiveness that characterizes

the catastrophe by ways of negation, critically emphasizing its total un-representability

and the inadequacy of visual evidence.

The tragic consequences of the Second World War are evoked in the exhibition by

Kopljar’s projection K15 (2012). K15 is a reenactment of Willy Brandt’s 1970 historic

kneeling down in front of the monument honoring the victims in the Warsaw Ghetto

killed by the Nazis. The role of Brandt, the chancellor of the Federal Republic of

Germany from 1969 to 1974, is played by Kopljar himself, who is seen dressed in the

white luminescent suit familiar from his film performances. The original scenery was

transferred into a night ambiance, lending the reenacted event a sense of dream and

fantasy. In relation to the war in Ukraine taking place not so far from Lithuania and

considering the history Lithuania shares with Russia and Ukraine, K15’s reflection on

Brandt’s act of repentance becomes a grim account of present-day reality.

Projected onto the back wall of the exhibition’s last room, Tuymans’ animation

Surrender (2017) can be described as a short war film. Framing a night scene viewed

from a distance, it shows a naval warrior coming out of the sea waving a white flag.

Additional warriors then join him and shortly after they all are taken down by gunshots

of an unseen source outside the frame. Surrender is based on a 2014 triptych by

Tuymans that employs stills from A Twist of Sand, a 1968 film about a former British

naval officer managing a business of smuggling goods from Africa. Although its source

material is rooted in British colonialism, Surrender enshrouds the identity of the

combating rivals and the reasons for their conflict, pointing to the relativity and

inconclusiveness of the projected images, and widely speaking, to the manipulative

potential of images in information warfare.



Patron: Renata and Rolandas Valiūnas

Exhibition supported by: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Trust for Mutual

Understanding, Flanders State of the Art, Roma Puišienė, Rasa Juodviršienė

Gallery supported by: Vilnius City Municipality, Lietuvos rytas, LRT, PST, Romas

Kinka, Ekskomisarų biuras, Mailerlite

Partners: Lithuanian National Museum of Art


Mercy: Zlatko Kopljar and Luc Tuymans

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