Victor Paukstelis

Vilnius, Lithuania

About Victor Paukstelis

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. They are more imagery-riddles like, because his personal mythology merges with the cultural one, combining reality and imagination according the principles of magical realism. Paukstelis not merely reproduces and repeats iconographic elements of his paintings. He somewhat collects images treating the medium of painting as an image-recollection catcher. Iconography of Victor’s paintings, at first glance, seems to be taken from snapshots. However, taken not from the ones, which are being kept in family albums for memory, but more likely from those, which have lost their genuineness, the ones that have turned into an ephemeral overview of the surrounding world. An important conceptual idea in Victor’s painting is a paradoxical state of recognisability and vagueness of painted images. The viewers are presented with images that are universally recognizable, but the narratives that they reveal provoke spectator to take a different view of those images than the one that is ingrained in memory and to expand these images with their own stories - to relate them with their own memories. Paukstelis experiments with painting media itself and looks for an extension of its technical capabilities, which also correspond to the multi-layered nature of ideas of his paintings.

Education:

In 2018 Victor graduated from his painting studies at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. During period of 2009-2012 he had a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris. In 2017, he received Vilnius Rotary Club Prize, in 2016 received VAA Justinas Vienožinskis Award.

Exhibitions:

2011 – with Tomas Kiauka exhibition in Ieva Simonaitytė public library in Klaipėda.
2012 – with Tomas Kiauka exhibition in Lithuania Artist Association in Vilnius.
2012–2013 m. – exhibition in Beatričė Grincevičiūtė museum in Vilnius.
2013 – selected artists exhibition in Arka gallery in Vilnius „Donelaitis 2013“.
2013 – selected artists exhibition in Arka gallery in Vilnius „XXI amžiaus anatomija“.
2014 – with Tomas Kiauka exhibition in Kėdainiai multicultural centre.
2014 – individual exhibition in Marija and Jurgis Šlapeliai house-museum in Vilnius.
2015 – individual exhibition in Compensa concert hall.
2016 – individual exhibition in Pylimas gallery in Vilnius.
2016 – individual exhibition in Canada (The Niagara Pumphouse Arts Centre).
2018 – solo exhibition in gallery “Akademija” in Vilnius