I heard the noise of a shattering window, but I didn't find any glass on the floor: ‘Maybe, something broke inside me. My body is a shattered window'.

'Objects in the mirror are closer, then they appear' is the first solo exhibition of Lithuanian artist Vytautas Kumža at Galerie Martin van Zomeren. It tackles the spatial, situational, and sculptural possibilities given by the passage of a presence, which already becomes an absence. The exhibition is an assemblage of manipulated situations that question those doubts arising after a breaking-in scene: 'When did it start? How did it end?'. The objects and the space are irreversibly marked by this incident releasing a new subtle reality. Every corner has proof of damage: they are all traces of a mystery. Objects liquify or heavily reconstruct themselves with new functionality. Forgotten objects are taken out of their context and immersed into ambiguous parallel energies: soft and firm, ungraspable and contained, light and dark.

Kumža shows a series of new twisted photographic works combined with sculptural objects and installations in the space. The practice behind the exhibition presents a possible dialogue between glass and photography: the glass is the tool for preserving a print, like a screen. But, in this case, it instigates the sharpness and potential harmfulness given by its physical element. In this exhibition, the glass, the invisible presence preceding the photographs, becomes visible, present, as a scalpel cutting the meanings behind every image. Glass isn't used as a material but as an expression of many temporal stages. It places the viewer not just in an observational position but also to speculate around new meanings, ending up in imaginary stories.

Vytautas Kumža (b.1992) is a Lithuanian visual artist based in Amsterdam. In 2017 he graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, with a BA in Photography.
His recent exhibitions include After The Day, Rooster Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2022), Shifting Presence, Prospekto Gallery, Vilnius, Lithuania (2021) and Half Empty, Half Full, Museum Villa Mondriaan, Winterswijk (2019), Hypernuit, Martin van Zomeren, Amsterdam (2022) and Uncoverings, MoPS (The Museum of Photography), Seoul, South Korea (2021).
In 2022, Kumža won the NN Art Award and in 2019, the Sybren Hellinga art prize.