What do you think of when you hear the word porcelain? Probably something delicate, smooth, and fragile. Mindaugas Navakas wants you to hold onto such associations—but only so that he can break them, crush them with something as heavy as a single-drum roller. The veteran Lithuanian sculptor treats porcelain like any other cheap ready-to-use industrial material. His sculptures are large, bulky, rough-textured, molded in deliberately reductive shapes with visible cracks on their surfaces. He challenges the material itself along with all of our assumptions about it.

Titled “China,” Navakas’s recent