Discipline and Routine: A Conversation with Augustas Serapinas

In “Physical Culture,” Lithuanian artist Augustas Serapinas’s current exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, visitors are invited into a hybrid performance space, drawing studio, and fully operational gym, where a range of Jesmonite sculptures have replaced conventional weights. Local fitness groups taking exercise classes, students from local universities participating in life-drawing sessions, and well-being groups hosting mixed-ability sessions and holistic workshops fill and activate the space over the course of the exhibition run.

Serapinas’s gym installations, which he first developed in 2012 while he was a student, question traditional standards of beauty and skill as they apply to art and the body. The sculptures featured in this iteration include examples of his own student work, casts of works drawn from the academic art canon, and copies of the Waverley heads—19th-century busts of art historical figures on the façade of the Nottingham Contemporary, which date to the building’s origins as the Nottingham School of Art. With disco tracks pumping through the space as people draw and work out, “Physical Culture” playfully challenges the role of institutions in setting and reinforcing narrow ideals.

Robert Preece: I have been going to the gym and using Nautilus equipment and free weights for four decades. What are you doing to my sacred space?
Augustas Serapinas: I just put a face on it. The gym equipment bears the weight of Greek and Roman sculptures long considered ideals of beauty in Western art history. In “Physical Culture,” one can train the body while having a dialogue with these figures. I invite visitors to reflect on the notion of the perfect body.

RP: How has the work been reconfigured since the series first appeared at your university sculpture department in Vilnius, when you were a third-year student?
AS: The first gym of 2012 was slightly different, because it was made with abandoned artworks that I found in the academy, left behind by students and older artists. Back then, I created only six pieces; today there are closer to 60. I have also improved the machines, so they function much better.

The current version of the gym seen at Nottingham Contemporary was rooted in my experience as a student of the National M. K. Čiurlionis School of Art, which I attended for eight years. There, I was trained in the classical method, which emphasizes drawing from life and mastering traditional techniques; this work questions and re-evaluates those practices.

RP: Why did you replace the weights with these specific sculptures?
AS: For centuries, artists trained by copying these sculptures, learning not only technique, but also culturally constructed ideas of the ideal body. Something equivalent happens in the gym, where bodies are shaped through discipline and routine to accord with ideals.

Weightlifting and drawing both involve repetition, precision, and the constant effort to improve. By attaching these forms to gym equipment, I explore the parallels between the repetitive labor of mastering classical art techniques and the discipline of sculpting the body in the gym.

RP: You’ve combined the site with an active drawing studio and performance space that makes me think of the video for Dead or Alive’s 1980s cover of “That’s the Way (I Like It),” which also plays with physical ideals. (I was an early Pete Burns fanatic.) Do you think your installation has the same energy or something different?
AS: Once the gym is activated, it is definitely as energetic. What makes the setting interesting is that the artwork combines the two disciplines, physical and academic training, inside an art institution. This way the work becomes a platform where different interests intertwine. It is important to me that in the exhibitions we collaborate with local gym trainers and drawing groups. One can train while critically reviewing the sources of how we understand beauty, whether toxic or not, imposed by the gaze from the heads.

RP: Are there specific reasons why you selected these sculptural busts?
AS: They are copies of classical antique Greek and Roman and Italian Renaissance sculptures, such as Michelangelo’s David, and Donatello’s Gattamelata, which are widely known in academic drawing communities. My selection was predetermined by the models I could find in my former school. Revisiting that past, I also included my own pieces from my student years: portraits of my classmates and other works, including a worm and an alien.

I like to adapt the work to its context. At Nottingham, I am especially grateful to curators Katie Simpson and Klara Szafrańska. With the help of the Nottingham Trent University Archive and casting specialists, we were able to incorporate heads from the university’s Waverly Building façade. These replicas feature artists from the 16th to 18th centuries, including Raphael, Benvenuto Cellini, and William Hogarth. Embedded in architecture and serving as examples, their inclusion in the gym connects local art education histories. The installation mainly consists of traditional academic sculpture; the work reflects on the dominance of able-bodied white male figures within fine art education and the beauty standards that continue to have cultural significance today.

RP: How did you choose the soundtrack?
AS: The Italian disco-inspired soundtrack has been part of the gym installation from the very beginning. When I was setting up the first gym in Tallinn, I hadn’t yet decided on the music. The curator of the exhibition, Gregor Taul, had a CD with these tracks. I immediately felt that it fit perfectly. The upbeat rhythm suits the sporty environment, motivating you to push a little harder, while also adding a sense of grandeur and performance to the experience of a workout.

One of the most emblematic songs related to the installation is “Move Your Body” by Marshall Jefferson, from the compilation album The House Sound of Chicago, Vol. 1: The Chicago Trax Album (1987). Another song to work out to is “Disco Circus” by Martin Circus (1978).

RP: Can you point to a couple of previous works that you think relate to or contrast with this installation?
AS: My works usually begin with the location and situation I find myself in. In some cases, I looked into neighbors of art institutions or people who work there. Through conversations, I would stumble on compelling details, which was the case with Sigi, made for Kunsthalle Wien in 2017. Visiting the workspace of the chief financial officer, I saw that she kept a box imitating the shape of a cat, which she had found in the street. This rather random object carries a personal narrative, which I enlarged and put on the museum’s roof terrace as a temporary icon of the institution.

I also worked within a specific context to create Chair for the Invigilator for the 2019 Venice Biennale curated by Ralph Rugoff. Invigilators are not allowed to sit in the main exhibition, and through a process of negotiation, I got permission to let them use my artwork and sit on beach chairs whenever they felt they needed to. In this way, they could have an overview of the room from an elevated position, and their role to the visitor is highlighted.

This is one side of my practice. The other major branch is working with vernacular architecture. In my home country, Lithuania, the rural landscape is filled with log houses that are often left unused in a state of decay or sold off for firewood. By salvaging and reconfiguring them into sculptural compositions, I reiterate their modular construction logic. So, there is nothing unnatural about them being moved or changed. I look at the history of materials and the social memory they carry.

RP: It’s been 14 years since the original “Physical Culture.” Could you have imagined this evolution when you first installed it?
AS: Not at all, I was not even dreaming about it. I would say it marked the very beginning of my career when my gallery, Emalin, showed the work at their debut participation in Frieze London; it was later acquired by the Tate. But it is hard to look back when the future looks so exciting.

I had a chance to produce a whole new gym that just opened in Portugal at Galeria Municipal do Porto. For “Physical Culture: Porto Edition,” we collaborated with a local museum dedicated to the academic sculptor António Soares dos Reis. The weights of the gym carry his sculptures, which creates a symbolic tie to the context of Porto, so the art scene there can identify with the work even more strongly.

“Physical Culture” is on view at Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham, England, through September 13, 2026. “Physical Culture: Porto Edition” is on view at Galeria Municipal do Porto through October 11.