Viltė Čepulytė (b. 2000) is a young generation painter who completed her Bachelor’s degree in painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2023. Since 2018, she has been participating in group exhibitions and has held solo exhibitions since 2022. In 2023, she won the special Rooster Gallery prize in the “Young Painter Prize” competition.
In her artwork, the artist explores the relationship between reality and imagination in painting, primarily using ancient Greek and Roman sculptures and their models. She examines the thin line between the imperceptibility of materials – sculptures embodying the human figure and the portrayal of sculptural materiality in the medium of painting. The reference for her monochromatic works is photography, serving as an intermediary between three-dimensional sculpture and two-dimensional painting. As the medium changes, the sculpture – the primary object – undergoes a double transformation. Here, the painter touches upon the core issues of representation and exposes the mechanisms that turn physical world forms into artistic images. In Čepulytė’s canvases, the journey from objects to their images and back is constant until the relationships between them become unstable, yielding to the imaginative power of the artist and the viewer.
The viewer’s role is crucial when reading the narrative, literary layer of the painter’s work. The metaphorical and ambiguous nature of ancient sculptures becomes the focal point of her paintings. Intuitively constructing narratives and manipulating their original meanings, the artist creates new myths for the viewer to interpret. The characters in her paintings are phantoms of non-existent realities, seemingly observed before and well-known, yet distant and estranged, trapped between the past and the present, coming to life during the encounter with the viewer.
