Andrius Zakarauskas studied painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Since 2004 he has been a participant in various group exhibitions in Europe, China and the USA, his works have been presented in prestigious galleries and contemporary art fairs. Since 2005 he has held several solo shows in Lithuania and abroad. In 2009 he became the winner of the competition “Young Painter Prize”. In 2011 Zakarauskas received a Young Creator Award from the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania. The artist’s works are held in the collection of National Gallery of Art, Mo museum, Lewben Art foundation, Ole Faarup collection, All Saint's Church in Vilnius, Elektrenai Church of Mary and private collections in Lithuania and abroad.
In his works, Lithuanian artist Andrius Zakarauskas focuses on the relation between the painter and painting. His paintings, predominantly portraits and multi-figure compositions, combine fragments of nature, landscapes or cityscapes, with fictional images and abstract segments to create complex multi-planar spaces and diachronic narratives. Painter is the main character in most of his canvases. His presence is evident even when he is not depicted. And when he is, his figure, often resembling Zakarauskas himself, manifests as the artist‘s alter ego. The painter is a creator and an object of creative work at the same time, a personification of a brushstroke. His touch on canvas becomes a catalyst of painting‘s story. The narrative is often driven by painter’s relation to the surface of painting, by his constant struggle to exceed its flatness, break through it, and pierce it. The painter not merely makes the painting, but also acts as a demiurge organizing pictorial space around him, providing form and meaning to things – creating his own world of brushstrokes.
This concept of painting as an aspiration to something that is above the mundane, which has been distinct in Zakarauskas’ works for several years already, in his newest paintings manifests itself in religious subject matter, most recently the Stations of the Cross. Biblical stories serve as a starting-point for his paintings. He looks at them from painter’s perspective, replaces usual characters with painter’s figure, and transforms into metaphors for painting and image making in general. Zakarauskas emphasizes the duality of painting process by conveying sensuousness, physicality and sacredness of the act of creation. He also addresses related topics of history of painting, artist’s status, and origin of the artwork. Besides a male painter, a female character often appears, embodying emotional, romantic aspects of the subject and defusing the dramatism and monumentality of the scenes with lyricism and intimacy.
