Ar\u016bnas Gel\u016bnas is an artist, philosopher, curator, and cultural diplomat. He has served as Director General of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art since 2019. His professional career encompasses museum leadership, academic research, artistic practice, cultural policy, and international diplomacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gel\u016bnas studied graphic art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and Japanese painting and calligraphy at Tokyo University of the Arts, where he was subsequently affiliated as a researcher. In 2001, he received his doctorate in philosophy from Vytautas Magnus University. His scholarly engagement with Japanese art resulted, among other publications, in the study \u201cMaking Art in the Japanese Way: Nihonga as a<\/strong> Process and Symbolic Action\u201d, published in Making Japanese Heritage<\/em> (Routledge, 2009).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Between 1997 and 2010, Gel\u016bnas taught printmaking, ink painting, art theory and the philosophy of art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and Ume\u00e5 Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden. He also lectured on the history of Japanese art at Vilnius University. From 2004 to 2010, he served as Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. He was Minister of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania from 2010 to 2012, Lithuania\u2019s Permanent Representative and Ambassador to UNESCO from 2012 to 2016, and a member of the Lithuanian Parliament from 2016 to 2019. In 2013, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Aalto University in Finland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Under Gel\u016bnas\u2019s leadership, the Lithuanian National Museum of Art has significantly expanded its collections, strengthened its research and publishing activities, and raised its international profile. Important bodies of work and documentary holdings associated with the philosopher Alphonso Lingis and the artists Nijol\u0117 \u0160ivickas de Mockus and Pranas Gailius have entered the Museum\u2019s collections. The archive of Jonas Mekas\u2014filmmaker, poet and a leading figure in international avant-garde cinema\u2014was transferred from New York to Vilnius, where the Museum established a dedicated research centre to preserve, study and disseminate his legacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Gel\u016bnas has initiated and developed major international collaborations with institutions including Carr\u00e9 d\u2019Art\u2013Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art contemporain de N\u00eemes, the Centre Pompidou, the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019art et d\u2019histoire du Juda\u00efsme in Paris, and Tate, as well as with representatives of Marc Chagall\u2019s family. These partnerships have led to significant exhibitions, loans, scholarly exchanges and publications. The Museum\u2019s collaboration with Tate has been particularly important in advancing the international presentation and scholarly study of the work of the Lithuanian-American artist Aleksandra Kasuba.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His curatorial projects include Protest Art: The Rebels of the Soviet Era<\/em> at the Radvila Palace Museum of Art (2020) and Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Manga, Anime, and S\u016bp\u0101 Furatto<\/em> at the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius (2024). Following Russia\u2019s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he initiated and curated a series of exhibitions presenting selections from more than 1,200 artworks evacuated by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art from museums in Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv. These included Magnificent Refugees of War: Masterpieces of Sixteenth-to Eighteenth-Century Western European Painting from the Collection of the Borys Voznytskyi Lviv National Art Gallery<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2023, Gel\u016bnas conceived the Room of One Masterpiece, a unique exhibition format designed to facilitate slow, individual encounters with works of art and their carefully developed historical and artistic contexts. The inaugural presentation placed paintings by Frans Hals within a specially designed contemplative multimedia space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 2024, Gel\u016bnas served as Commissioner of the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. He has published scholarly articles, translations, and essays, and has edited or compiled books on philosophy, cultural studies, art theory, art education, and art history. His publications include Art Studies: Between Method and Fancy<\/em> (Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2006), Museum of Friends: The Collection of Vladimir Tarasov at the Lithuanian National Museum of Art<\/em> (2020), Protest Art: The Rebels of the Soviet Era<\/em> (2022), and Beauties, Ghosts, and Samurai: The Japanese Pop Culture Tradition from Edo Ukiyo-e to Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Manga, Anime, and S\u016bp\u0101 Furatto<\/em> (2024). He also invited Alphonso Lingis to compile a collection of essays on art and aesthetics, published by the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in 2025 as Alphonso Lingis: Art Beginning Again<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n His research interests encompass Lithuanian and Western art from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, classical and contemporary Japanese art, artistic expression under totalitarian regimes, cultural diplomacy, and contemporary museology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For his work strengthening cultural ties with Japan, Gel\u016bnas received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star, from the Japanese Government in 2020. In 2023, he received the Officer\u2019s Cross of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. In 2025, by decree of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he was awarded the Ukrainian Order of Merit, III degree. He was subsequently appointed a Knight of France\u2019s National Order of the Legion of Honour in recognition of his service to cultural cooperation between Lithuania and France.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ar\u016bnas Gel\u016bnas is an artist, philosopher, curator, and cultural diplomat. He has served as Director General of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art since 2019. His professional career encompasses museum leadership, academic research, artistic practice, cultural policy, and international diplomacy. Gel\u016bnas studied graphic art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and Japanese painting and calligraphy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37453,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"department":[69],"class_list":["post-36679","page","type-page","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","department-lithuanian-national-museum-of-art"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37457,"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/36679\/revisions\/37457"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"department","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lndm.devmerit.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/department?post=36679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}