‘Father’, a solo exhibition by Mykolas Valantinas, is anchored in an archive of drawings and prints by his father, artist Rytis Valantinas. Mykolas reinterprates and transforms this inherited material through the use of artificial intelligence. The AI-generated works, which blend seamlessly into the archive, gradually transition into another essential thread of Rytis Valantinas’ practice: money. He designed some of the first banknotes of independent Lithuania – the talonas and the litas – and created the never-issued one-thousand-litas note. By reworking this denomination and its constituent elements, the exhibition explores personal and collective history, generational ties, national identity, authorship, and the limits of legality.
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’.