“Floating” II Painting

Victor Paukstelis (b. 1983) is a Lithuanian painter. Currently he lives and works in Vilnius, Lithuania. He has been actively involved in exhibitions since 2011. He held eight solo shows and participated in group exhibitions in Lithuania, Poland, Belarussia, Canada. V. Paukstelis presented his animated painting project “Restless Paintings” in Austria, Germany, USA, and Sweden. His paintings have become part of the collections of Modern Art Centre (Mo Museum) in Vilnius and of independent Lithuanian and foreign art collectors. In 2018 Victor graduated from his painting studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA). During the period of 2009-2012 he had a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris. In 2017, he received Vilnius Rotary Club Prize and in 2016 received VAA Justinas Vienožinskis Award. V. Paukstelis draws creative inspirations for his canvases from manifold cultural field, especially - painting and its history. In his work, Victor combines several layers of visual and conceptual features borrowed from art history, contemporary painting, cinema, photography, literature, as well as autobiographical elements. He constructs narratives from details belonging to different periods, gives new meanings to both personal memories and culturally recognizable images. The artist deals with the topic of interaction between individual and cultural memory. Manipulating and mixing visual material from personal memorabilia and art history, Paukstelis explores how cultural memory influences creative process and analyses; how the meaning of image changes in the course of time. He explores the nature of both conscious images and of those he paints – he explores if it is possible to separate images that belong to the universal imagery catalogue from those that belong to archive of individual memory. He aims at feasibly drawing a boundary between what is memorized culturally and personally by investigating the ways in which individual memory interacts with collective memory. Paukstelis is preoccupied with the very nature of the medium of painting as such, he analyses it’s pictorial identity in contemporary visual realm. His creative practice deals with question of authenticity. Not surprisingly, in his work, Victor invokes a method of appropriation. However, appropriated motives in his paintings are not borrowed directly.