Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus. The Universe from a Spiral

Nijolė Šivickas de Mockus (1925–2018) was a Lithuanian-born Colombian artist whose life and work embody the dramatic upheavals of the twentieth century, the experience of exile, and an extraordinary artistic journey.

Born near the Nevėžis River in central Lithuania, she fled to Germany with her sister in 1944 as the second Soviet occupation approached. While working in a metalworking factory, she continued to draw and was later admitted to the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, where the ideas of post-war European modernism and the revival of the Bauhaus tradition shaped her early artistic development.

Following her first solo exhibition in Colombia in 1955, Šivickas discovered clay – a material that would define her entire creative practice. After the tragic death of her husband, she founded the AkmuO studio, which became an important centre for design, crafts, and artistic creation. Over time, her work evolved towards organic forms inspired by nature and pre-Columbian cultures, while her sculptures and objects gradually developed into spatial compositions the artist herself referred to as installations.

Šivickas left behind a remarkable legacy of drawings, paintings, sculptures, and installations that weave together the cultural experiences of Lithuania, Europe, and Latin America. Exhibition curator and scholar Laura Moreno Barbosa invites visitors to perceive her oeuvre as a cyclical, spiralling universe – an encounter of cultures inspired by the worldviews of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, inviting us on a journey of discovery where, through fire and clay, we rediscover ourselves from the mountains to the plains.