Erika Povilonytė

Erika Povilonytė is an artist currently living in France and working in the collective studio Les Ateliers La Volière, Dijon. Her work has been exhibited not only in Lithuania, but also in international exhibitions in Canada and France. In 2021 Erika Povilonytė graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree and later became a finalist of the Young Painter Prize in the Baltic States. The jury of the competition awarded the artist a special mention for the subtlety of her paintings in a collective exhibition at the MO Museum. In 2022, Erika Povilonytė’s solo exhibition Gylio Anatomija (Anatomy of Depths) opened at the Klaipėda KCCC Exhibition Hall, her first after studying abroad. In the same year, she became the artist represented by THE ROOM.

With her works, the artist seems to draw a line between the concepts of pain and beauty, brutality and tenderness. In her hands, the matter of paper becomes a metaphor for viscous earth, hard stone and sometimes the most sensitive skin. By depicting the beauty of the world’s grandeur and fragility with fluttering paper bodies, the artist invites archaic shapes and colours to resonate with today’s notes.

Time crystallises life into forms, fossils, reliefs. Through beings, nothingness is born, through fragile contours, voids stretch. In the same way, my work creates limits between the processes of formation and disappearance, survival and decay. Masses and lines play on defined territories and no-man’s lands.
The works, imbued with archaeological order, flutter between the laws of animate and inanimate nature. With a gentle movement of the paper, I lead this delicate matter into a delicate dialogue, in small dots and bursts of colour. Carefully resurrected archaic forms tell a myth born in the interaction of the fields of magic and mystery.

(Erika Povilonytė)