Aistė Kirvelytė. Actions and Consequences

On March 8 – April 2, 2022, an exhibition of paintings by Aistė Kirvelytė titled Actions and Consequences will be on display at Vilnius Graphic Art Centre’s Kairė-dešinė gallery.
The opening will be held on March 8, from 6–8 pm.

Aistė Kirvelytė’s work took shape during a controversial period, the end of the 20th century, amid rapid social and cultural upheaval and transformation. In her works, the artist explores her relationship with cultural heritage and the themes of memory, locality, and globalization. The expressive language of her paintings consists of manifold semantic layers; the works are enigmatic and unfathomable, while standing in front of these huge formats repeatedly makes one ‘doubt one’s own scale’, according to the renowned art critic Alfonsas Andriuškevičius.

The painter does not stay away from local and global narratives such as climate change, identity, or an individual’s place in the contemporary world. The elements on her canvas appear to gravitate within an invisible network, becoming bodies or social gestures. Kirvelytė’s metamodern work emerges from a desire for the real. Her paintings often feature local events and sites, while the existing social environment is one of the keys to understanding the works. At the same time, they are characterized by a postmodern perspective: irony and nihilism, citations, and contrasts between high and pop culture signs. The artist consciously continues the painting tradition while also approaching it critically and looking at it from the side.

Aistė Kirvelytė (b. 1969) is a painter. She studied at the Vilnius Academy of Arts from 1992–1998 and at the Universität der Künste Berlin from 2001–2002. Kirvelytė has been holding solo shows and taking part in group exhibitions as well as interdisciplinary art projects in Lithuania and abroad since 1999. Presenting works created in 2019–2021, Actions and Consequences is her 10th solo exhibition.