Aistė Kirvelytė belongs to the generation of moderate painting reformers who debuted in the second half of the 20th century.Kirvelytė "infected" painting with huge formats, and such formats of advertising awnings in themselves paradoxised the clichés of Lithuanian (neo-)expressionist painting. Secondly, the artist introduced unexpected (for Expressionist painting) thematic leitmotifs (especially exploiting irony), sometimes also close to pop art.
But one of the artist's essential "innovations" are the (large-format) cycles of canvases, constructed on the basis of a comic book (reading) or even on a cinematographic principle. Often Kirvelytė's paintings can only be read in the context of a particular cycle, while the "story" or concept of this cycle is told in a broader sense, unfolding on a level close to film or video montage. It is no coincidence that one of Kirvelytė's first painting cycles was dedicated to "cinema" or "fortography". A certain character, emerging in a thicket of brushstrokes, looks in front of the light at the frames on a film or a filmstrip. At the same time, the cycle of paintings of the "looking at the film" itself can be symbolically treated as stills from a photo or a film.
This is an important aspect of Kirvelytė's paintings, because the artist, while seemingly not drastically changing the (neo-)expressionist manner of painting, has fundamentally altered the principles of (re)reading painting by linking it with the essence of interdisciplinary art. The "trick" of Kirvelytė's painterly tactics is that her paintings (cycles) can be read in a "traditional" way, but they can also be treated as a kind of framing, a kind of animation (operating on principles).
Kirvelytė also creates (video) animations paradoxically talking about painting and the painterly problematic. In this way, the principle of her work is based on "reversal" - large format painting series often refer to the problematics of photography, cinema, or mass communication means (media), while video and animation seem to be directed towards the (de)construction of a formal language close to painting.
Kirvelytė's work often employs the tactics of depicting popular magazines, mass communication media, cinema, graphic advertising, the creation of a (socio-ideological) narrative, and montage, highlighting their artificiality, ironizing and parodying them.
