Vilnius Picture Gallery welcomed its visitors to the Illusorium – a labyrinth of image and memory anamorphoses. To find a way out, one had to unravel the painting puzzles of contemporary artist Patricija Jurkšaitytė. Patricija (b. 1968) began her creative career concurrently with the so-called „breakthrough generation,“ which established the foundations of Lithuanian contemporary art. Unlike other creators of that generation, Jurkšaitytė always found inspiration in classical art, the paintings of Renaissance, Baroque, and Dutch masters, and in the eternal spectator’s effort to disenchant the picture, to glimpse beyond it.

Early on, a distinctive feature of Jurkšaitytė’s work became imitation of the well-known masterpieces by the Renaissance and Baroque masters, key difference being that the main characters were left out. Later, she practiced imagination stretching by painting in a renaissance manner empty resort hotel rooms and antique furniture displays, by breaking portrait painting traditions. In recent years, she painted showroom interiors of the furniture giant IKEA, a symbol of an ideal welfare for a contemporary middle-class consumer. 

The artist likes a playful intellectual paradox: the invisible becomes tangible, and the visible starts looking deceptive and fake. This exhibition invites the visitor to look at the artist’s works of different periods as a holistic philosophical collection that uses codes of significance, symbols, and compositional rendering to play with the spectator’s knowledge of art history and imagination.

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