The Sculpture Gym: When Art Can Sweat

At the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Lithuania, a 1,000-square-meter hall has been transformed into a gym. Inside there are barbells, dumbbells, cable machines, and training benches. But none of the weights are made of iron. They're made of plaster. Plaster Apollo heads, plaster replicas of David, plaster ancient Greek torsos.

What you're lifting isn't a 20-kilogram iron plate, but a Renaissance sculpture.

This is Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas's installation work "Physical Culture." Exhibited in Vilnius from February to May 2025, visitors can actually enter the gym and use these plaster sculpture weights for training.

A Fine Arts Student's Repetitive Labor

Serapinas first had this idea in 2012 while studying at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. The traditional training method in fine arts academies is to repeatedly copy classical sculptures: sketching Apollo's head, sketching Venus's arms, sketching the folds of Michelangelo's robes. Day after day, the same plaster casts, the same angles.

One day he realized: this is exactly the same logic as gym training. Working out also involves repeatedly lifting the same weight, over and over, until the movement becomes muscle memory. The core methodology of fine arts academies and gyms is identical: achieving mastery through repetition.

The only difference is that one trains the muscles that hold a pencil, while the other trains the muscles that grip a barbell. But the goals they pursue are strikingly consistent: making one's body closer to some "ideal form."

The Gym Is a Modern Temple

In an interview with Yatzer, Serapinas explained his core viewpoint: the gym and the museum are two versions of the same space.

A museum is a place of cultural worship. You walk in, look up at the perfect body proportions of ancient Greek statues, and feel a sense of awe. A gym is also a place of worship. You walk in, train in front of a mirror, trying to make your body closer to some ideal shape. Both spaces have the same core dynamic: you are trying to make yourself more like an ideal image.

In "Physical Culture," he merged these two spaces. You lift sculptures as exercises in a museum. You are simultaneously an audience for art and a practitioner of the body. Classical aesthetics is no longer an exhibit on the wall, but a weight in your hands.

What You Didn't Know: From Art Basel to Vilnius

"Physical Culture" didn't appear out of nowhere. Serapinas began developing this concept in 2012, and it evolved over more than a decade.

In 2016, he exhibited an early version at Frieze London art fair. In 2023, he brought "Čiurlionis Gym" to Art Basel Unlimited in Switzerland, making it the first time the concept appeared on the global art stage. The Vilnius exhibition is a homecoming: returning the concept that originated from his student days at the Vilnius Academy of Arts back to the city where it was born.

From a student's intuition to the global stage of Art Basel, and then to a 1,000-square-meter homecoming exhibition. A thought that "art class feels like weight training" took thirteen years to become a significant work of contemporary art.

What the Ancient Greeks Already Knew

The reason Serapinas's work is powerful is that it reveals a fact that modern people have forgotten: in ancient Greece, art and athletics were never separate.

The ancient Greek "gymnasium" was simultaneously an athletic training ground and a cultural education center. Plato built his Academy next to a gymnasium; Aristotle built the Lyceum at another. Gymnasiums were filled with sculptures of Heracles and athletes, serving not only as decoration but as "visual textbooks" for training: here is the ideal body, now train to achieve it.

The Greeks had a specific term for this ideal of unity between body and mind: "kalokagathia" — the combination of physical beauty (kalos) and moral goodness (agathos). A truly complete person was not just strong or just wise, but both at once.

Two thousand five hundred years later, Serapinas, using dumbbells made of plaster sculptures, reconnected this severed link.

When You Lift Apollo

In the exhibition hall of "Physical Culture," one detail is particularly worth noting. Next to the training area, there are wooden easels and drawing paper. You can first do a few sets of exercises with the sculptures, then sit down and sketch the same sculpture.

This design visualizes Serapinas's core question: what is your relationship with this Apollo? Are you admiring it, copying it, or trying to become it?

The answer may be: all of the above. Fine arts students copy sculptures to understand the perfect form. Gym-goers lift weights to approach the perfect form. Both behaviors lead to the same destination: humanity's eternal desire for the "ideal body."

The only difference is that one person puts the ideal on paper, while the other puts it on their own body. Serapinas says: both are sculpture.