ArtVilnius’24 Participants and Guests Are Welcome at the Night Gallery Festival Art After Hours

October 3, 2024

The traditionally returning Art After Hours art festival will once again create a special October night in Vilnius on Friday evening. This year’s festival highlights the diversity of the spectrum of art forms, the abundance of artists, and the internationality of the festival. 

The doors of the city’s galleries and institutions will open completely free of charge for art lovers and night owls this Friday, October 4. 

 Vilnius will be full of culture as never before – the morning will start with the opening of the 15th-anniversary art fair ArtVilnius’24 at the Lithuanian Exhibition and Congress Centre LITEXPO. Art lovers will be able to get acquainted with 67 contemporary art galleries and 15 art institutions from 14 countries. “Starting at 6 pm, the Art After Hours festival will present another 13 galleries and more than 100 artists,” says festival coordinator Lukas Stanionis.  

The Art After Hours festival invites night-time visitors to take a peek into the reconstructed exhibition spaces, and throughout the evening there will be meetings with artists and curators and a free guided tour of the city’s five galleries with an art historian starting at 8 pm. 

Festival coordinator Lukas Stanionis says that this year Art After Hours wants to introduce art lovers to the widest possible range of artistic disciplines and forms of expression, as the program features a large number of artists. The exhibitions that will be on show also dictate the result of this abundance, with many group exhibitions and as many as three galleries presenting collections of artists under their patronage. 

L. Stanionis says that the festival’s emphasis on internationalism is equally important. The program includes two triennials – the International Vilnius Painting Triennial and the International Triennial of Small Graphic Forms. 

The Vilnius Graphic Art Centre presents the 11th International Triennial of Small Graphic Forms, with 63 artists from 19 countries. A guided tour of the exhibition will be led by Viltė Visockaitė, one of the curators of the triennial. Inspired by art historian Aby Warburg’s atlas of images Mnemosyne, the exhibition’s architecture combines prints of different printmaking techniques, styles, and themes. The organizers of the triennial encouraged the artists to focus on the stories and myths, prejudices and beliefs, joys and sorrows, tensions and challenges of today’s world, and how these shape our existence and everyday life.

The Lithuanian Artists’ Association opens the second part of the 18th International Vilnius Painting Triennial at the Titanikas exhibition halls of the Vilnius Academy of Arts. It features two exhibitions – the Baltic Artists Collection curated by Meda Norbutaitė and the collection of Arvydas Žalpys and the Nordic and Baltic Young Artists Award nominees curated by Estonian curator Andra Orn. The triennial aims to draw attention to the sorrows of today’s life and to explore how they are presented and reflected upon in the work of artists. The exhibition features works by 21 artists from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, and Sweden.

On the other side of the street – at the VAA Outdoor Expo – the Vilnius Academy of Arts Gallery 5 Malūnai will present the exhibition Eccentricity by the 1st year students of the VAA Master’s Degree Programme in Graphic Arts, Jonė Dūdaitė and Jokūbas Griška. This exhibition questions the gallery’s exhibition space, the content of which is not accessible to the human touch or full vision. The authors will provide insights and stories about the creative process in a meeting with visitors at 9 pm. 

Not far away – in the Bernardinai Gardens – on Friday evening, visitors will be able to discover another site-specific exhibition that will be open 24 hours a day – the exposition of Mindaugas Navakas’ sculptures 5 Objects (2), organized by the gallery AV17. The exhibition is inspired by the artist’s series of sketches Vilniaus sąsiuvinis (Vilnius Notebook), created in 1981-1985, in which he presented unrealized projects. Navakas’ new series of works is characterized by impressive volume and mass, irony, and provocation for both space and the viewer, and continues the artist’s previously cultivated ideas.

The first exhibition of sculptor Džiugas Jurkūnas’ paintings True Stories will be held at the AP Gallery in Užupis. After sketching life-size sculptures on large canvases, the artist suddenly found himself caught up in painting, a long-hidden desire to try a different kind of creativity. 

Artist Kristina Norvilaitė will also open the doors of her gallery to the wide public. From half past nine in the evening, she invites art lovers to a meeting where she will talk about her abstract exhibition Just a hunch.

The Interdisciplinary Artists’ Union will present an exhibition of new members, Disciplines, at the Atletika Gallery. The curator of the exhibition says that “disciplines are no longer a taboo or a fetish, but something difficult to express in the vocabulary to which we have become accustomed.” The exhibition also asks what the artists’ personal disciplines are – routines, rituals, exercises in productivity and inspiration – and seeks the links between disciplinary expression and overarching emotional self-discipline.

The Artists’ Association Gallery, which is opening its doors after a long reconstruction, invites visitors to the opening of the exhibition Find in g and a meeting with the authors and curators. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore the history of Lithuanian painting and the wide range of artists – from Maria-Teresė Rožanskaitė, Kazimieras Žoromskis, Sofija Liugailienė-Veiverytė, Galina Petrova-Džiaukštienė, Algimantas Švėgzda, Linas Katinas, Antanas Gudaitis, Stasys Jusionis, Jonas Juodzevičius, Klaudijus Petrulis to the most recent and active ones, Meda Norbutaitė, Linas Lianzbergis, Rūta Eidukaitytė, Mykolė, Audrius Gražys, Arvydas Kašauskas, Adela Liepa Kaunaitė, Vytautas Kaunas, Andrius Makarevičius, Vilmantas Marcinkevičius, Inga Mrazauskė, Laura Slavinskaitė, Vytautas Tomaševičius, Goda Lukaitė, and Kristina Asinus.

Just a few steps away on Vokiečių Street, in the Project Space of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association, Latvian glass artist Marta Ģibiete will present the exhibition Es nevaru rimties / I can’t calm down. The artist creates new formations from glass pieces – objects that seem to have life and a few secrets.

The doors of the Vartai Gallery will open together with the exhibition SPEKTRAS 2. It is a group exhibition of contemporary art and collectible design dedicated to the work of the gallery’s represented and invited artists. The dynamic and evolving group exhibition features the work of more than 50 artists – from emerging artists to stars of the contemporary art world.

The sixth solo exhibition INFJ by Julia Skudutytė is on view at the gallery Meno Niša, where the artist exhibits new works created during her art residency in Düsseldorf, Germany. As Matthias Grotevent, the curator of the exhibition in Düsseldorf, tells us, in her work, Julia is naturally confronted with her own nature, so she decided to take a personality test she found on the internet. The test identifies sixteen different personality types, and Skudutytė’s results described her personality as a very special type of INFJ. Only 1% of people in the whole world, such as Jesus, are INFJ. 

Another new exhibition will open at the Pamėnkalnis Gallery of the Lithuanian Artists’ Association. Kęstutis Grigaliūnas will present his personal exhibition Ghost, Hares, Gediminas, and Octopus. The Terror in the Vilnelė, The Spirit of Sigismund Augustus, Vytautas in a Good Mood, The New Vilnia Bear Choir, The Contents of Barbora’s Purse, Thunder Playing with a Stone, The Choir of the Damned from the Church of St. Johns – these are just some of the imaginary stories of Vilnius that visitors will find in the artist’s latest exhibition. 

The last stop of the festival program is the Drifts Gallery, which is currently exhibiting the group exhibition Letters of the Lioness curated by Monika Lipšic. The exhibition deals with the place of women as creators in society, their creative energy, erotic impulse, freedom to create, and the power to destroy. The exhibition includes works by artists Ieva Rojūtė, Monika Jagusinskytė, Eglė Pilkauskaitė, Ieva Rižė, and Elvyra Kairiūkštytė. The opening performance will be performed by Samuel Barbier-Ficat.


The Gallery Festival Art After Hours will take place on Friday evening, October 4 in Vilnius. The main partner of the festival is the art fair ArtVilnius.