Valdas Kurklietis

Valdas Kurklietis (b. 1975) is an artist based in Lithuania and Sweden, best known for his ceramic sculptural heads, which reveal his exploratory, anthropological view of himself and the world. Starting his creative career in 1994 at Kaunas School of Art, and later in the same city at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Faculty of Ceramics, where he received his Master’s degree in 2002, the artist became involved in various conceptual art and ceramic projects. However, his active creative phase began only after a break, with his competitive exhibitions in Kaunas in 2010-2011 and his first solo exhibition, Trial Time, in 2012.

Kurklietis has realized himself as a kind of artist-scientist, a ceramicist-surgeon. His personal experiences are interesting only as a kind of object of research, allowing him to look at himself in a broader context, i.e., as a social animal, dependent not only on the community in which he lives physically but also on the societies of other countries, which influence the whole system of the world organism. This is precisely why Kurklietis’ work is rich in global social, biological, and political themes, exploring issues of climate change, industrial activity, science, pandemics, war, and local communities. Equally important are the explorations of personal identity, manifested in themes of loneliness, virtual communication, alien influences, and the search for meaning.

The head is not just a motif; it is a symbolic format and a site for creative experimentation. It is covered by the impersonal, laconically smiling face of the mannequin. It is a mask, a marketing trick, a survival strategy in the social games of human beings, allowing chameleonic adaptation to almost any environment. This is precisely why Kurklietis’ most interesting artistic solutions are located in the various cavities of the head – where the eyeballs, the brain, and the ears should be. Each artwork looks like a separate medical operation as if the heads were stone monuments to humanity, a scalpel attempting to cut through the existential layers of identity and to peer into the mysteries that lead to the various movements. The artist makes extensive use of provocative contrasts, the grotesque, personal, and cross-cultural symbolism, and is fond of combinations of the absurd, the repulsive, and the witty, which at times give way to figurative poetics of tenderness. The associative nature of various ceramic sculptures, mosaics, and even functional vessels makes Kurklietis’ artworks extremely universal and timeless as if we were looking at puzzles reminiscent of Rubik’s cubes, which can open up with their meanings in new ways, depending on the changes in the personal and global context.

While living in Sweden (since 2014) and traveling around Norway and Iceland, the ceramicist became involved in Nordic cultural life and began to sculpt using Scandinavian stone masses, cold, grey, and blue colors, rough textures, and aesthetic replicas in stone and ice. Currently, V. Kurklietis is a member of various Lithuanian and Swedish art associations (LAA, K.H.V.C, KRO/KIF), has participated in more than 70 group and solo exhibitions in different countries around the world, and is actively involved in art projects representing Lithuania and the entire Baltic region. His works can be found in both private and public collections in Taiwan, Sweden, Italy, Latvia, and Romania. He has received several awards, including The Bruckner Foundation Prize (Musée de Carouge, Switzerland, 2024) and the Silver Prize at the 39th International Ceramics Competition Water, wonder of the Earth (Gualdo Tadino, Italy, 2017).

Text by art critic Kamilė Pirštelytė Virbičianskė.

Visit Valdas Kurklietis’s website and Instagram page.