Algirdas Mikutis claims his spiritual kinship with the masters of the 18th century German amber figurines and the art of the Far East. Reminiscences of the ancient cultures seem to be a powerful source for shaping his sculptures. In huge opaque pieces of amber (amber is fragile and tends to fracture), he models a complex forms in relief and drills cavities. His characters are a nimble mice, a comic elk, a cute man and fantastic creatures emerging from a lump of amber, are nice and warm like amber itself. The exhibition of 2001 was entitled MMM Amber Sculpture. Of the three ‘M’s, the first two represent the family names of the artist and the owner of the gallery, while the third one stands for ‘material’. Material, spelled with the capital ‘M’, can be easily mastered by a skilled hand and powerful imagination. The artist often produces items that have a practical function – in these he combines amber with horn or wood. He is convinced that nice things serve as a reliable source of positive emotions. In the exhibition Losses the artist improvises with the subjects of pagan Lithuanian mythology and refers to the archaic art of various countries when he creates statues of mythological creatures. The Lord of the Pantheon is Thunder – he looks not like a threatening Lord of Lightning, but like a dancing Oriental deity; the goddess of forests, Medeina, is associated with African sculpture, and the figure of the God of the Sea, Bangpūtis, to amateur primitivism. Warm humour characteristic also to the characters from Lithuanian folk tales captures attention. The spirit of home, Kaukas, who does good and bad, looks like a shrunk, cowering bird; the Reaper tries to scare one with a long, forked tongue; the face of the grotesque Witch is reminiscent of a monkey.
