The starting point of ‘Father’, Mykolas Valantinas’ solo exhibition, is the archive of drawings and prints by his father, artist Rytis Valantinas, which the son transforms using artificial intelligence. The filter of new technologies brings to the surface the contradictory dynamics between father and son: a mixture of adoration and a ‘desire’ to appropriate or ‘take over’ the father’s work. The AI-generated images that interpolate the archive are exhibited alongside another essential offshoot of the father’s creative oeuvre – money.
Rytis Valantinas is the author of some of the first banknotes of independent Lithuania – the talonas and litas. He also created a 1000-litas note that never entered circulation. The exhibition presents money in a twofold manner: as a political, cultural and economic symbol – the heritage of an entire nation – and as a family relic, laden with memories and claims of inheritance. The deconstruction of the 1000-litas note into the constituent elements needed for counterfeiting becomes a creative gesture that binds together personal and mythological worlds, exposes the mechanisms of value creation, and blurs the boundaries between original and copy, reality and fiction.
MYKOLAS VALANTINAS is an emerging artist based in Vilnius. He holds a BA in Philosophy from Vilnius University and an MA in Photography from the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), Switzerland.
Valantinas’s practice includes video, photography, and installation. His works have been exhibited in Lithuania and abroad, including seventeen international venues as part of ‘Artists’ Film International 2025: Dream States’, Radvila Palace Museum of Art in Vilnius (2024), the National Gallery of Art (NDG), the Nida Art Colony (2023) and Platform L Gallery in Seoul (2022), among others. In 2023, Valantinas received the Audience Award of the ‘JCDecaux Prize 2023: In Exchange to Ages’.