Signs of Memory: The Work by Rimantas Sakalauskas

Rimantas Sakalauskas is a well-known sculptor, a winner of the national award of the Republic of Lithuania (2006). He was born in Šiauliai on 10 June 1951 and graduated from the State Art Institute of the Lithuanian SSR majoring in sculpture in 1977.

Since 1991 the artist’s public works have been mainly erected in churches, chapels and cemeteries. An exception is the composition “Mandala” (2013) in the Tibet Square in Vilnius.
During his career Sakalauskas created 20 gravestone monuments (mainly in Vilnius, and one in each of the towns of Druskininkai, Kelmė, Šiauliai, Švėkšna and Utena) and twelve pieces of church equipment – altars, tabernacles and receptacles of holy water.
The sculptor’s grand work that took him four years to create is the altar of the Bernardine Church in Vilnius (1994–1998). After that he made the altars for the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and the Chapel of the Holy Stairs at the Bernardine Church in Vilnius. In 2000, he furnished the presbytery of the chapel of the Franciscan hermitage on the Hill of Crosses (created the altar, tabernacle and lectern for the reading of the Holy Scripture) – it was Sakalauskas’s first work for a sanctuary of contemporary architecture. In 2001, he created the altar for the reconstructed chapel of the church of the Kretinga monastery, and in 2005 – the altar for the Martyrs’ Crypt of the same church. His latest liturgical work is an altar erected in the Lukšiai church in the summer of 2014.

The exhibition contains models of liturgical works and gravestone monuments, as well as photographs of finished works. In this way the genesis of an artistic idea from its conception to the final execution is presented. All models are made from baked clay. Ceramics is Sakalauskas’s favourite technique. He has made quite many vessels of remarkable beauty – vases, bowls and chalices. He also creates models of sculptural compositions from clay, which he later bakes and turns into independent works. “My small-scale models are rudiments of a new work”, the artist says. “Later, while making a large work, I add changes and improvements. But the original variant remains dear to me. I don’t even dare to bake it until the work has not been finished, so that nothing bad happens to it. When the client collects the finished work, I bake the model and put it ‘under the glass’ like a treasure. I place it into a large glass jar, where I keep the models of my earlier works. It is very convenient: the jar is transparent, and I can look at all my life’s works every day.”

The concept of memory in Sakalauskas’s work has been very important since the very beginning of his career. The artist builds his personal identity and the identity of his family, his city of Vilnius and his nation on the perception of the past. He admits that the question of preserving the culture of small nations has been urgent to him already since adolescence. At first it was based on intuition, and in the course of time the artist acquired some knowledge that helped him reflect on this topic more consistently and relate it to the intersections and oppositions between the East and the West, Islam and Christianity, and the impact of the loss of statehood on culture. He shaped his thoughts into images creating the sculptures “An Arab” (1980), “Mandala” (2013), projects of monuments to General Jonas Žemaitis and the fallen soldiers of the detachment of General Povilas Plechavičius (correspondingly 1998 and 1999), and gravestone monuments to Lithuanian cultural figures – writer Birutė Pukelevičiūtė, poet Paulius Širvys, Alfredas Tautavičius and others. The sculptor also reflected on memory and its signs while creating altars for the churches that were closed and desecrated in the Soviet period – the Bernardine Church, the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary in Vilnius, the Chapel of the Holy Stairs at the Bernardine Church and others, and while furnishing the crypt of the victims of the war with Sweden in the Kretinga church.
In the opinion of Sakalauskas, memory is an instrument of “arranging” and preserving the past, which guarantees the possibility of communication, activity and, generally speaking, survival of a certain group of people – in this case, the citizens of Lithuania.

The artist works slowly. He makes each object as if it did not have invisible sides. That is why a spectator wishing to absorb a work by Sakalauskas fully cannot be in a hurry either. These efforts are generously rewarded, as his works bring us not only a deep aesthetic satisfaction, but also a comforting realisation that in this world changing at a crazy speed there still are people who are able to resist the hustle and bustle of our times and create artworks as if they were bound to survive for long centuries.
According to the artist himself, it is nothing out of the ordinary. He asserts, “I merely find small details very important. I am inspired, for example, by what I used to admire in my childhood, while staying at my grandmother’s place in Šiauliai. My heart always jumps when I take an old porcelain cup, in which everything is important, every single detail and even the factory logo counts. To me old furniture and old lace is beautiful. Probably that is why I am so fascinated by monograms. When I started to work in the field of church art, it acquired great importance. Sometimes large objects and stone constructions appear from small things.”

The liturgical works and gravestone monuments by Rimantas Sakalauskas are presented for the public for the first time. The works on display belong to the collections of Romanas Raulynaitis, LAWIN law firm and the artist’s private collection.

Giedrė Jankevičiūtė