Andrėja Maiburovaitė. Exhibition Crude
“The oil is applied in thin, translucent layers of brown, green, and gold so that the energetic weight remains illusory,” says Andrėja Maiburovaitė, a young artist presenting her exhibition Crude at the Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša on Wednesday, June 11 at 6 pm.
Crude is Andrėja Maiburovaitė’s (b. 2000) third solo exhibition, in which autobiographical themes reflecting on family history, loss, and the fragility of human relationships will be explored. Having spent the first years of her life in the oil industry town of Mažeikiai, the artist seeks poetic connections between memories, archival material, and the banality of everyday life, exploring the transformative potential of crude oil through the medium of painting. It is from this environment and her experiences there that the idea for her artistic research project – painting with oil – was born.
According to the artist, oil’s most fascinating feature is its charge. Extracted from the depths of the earth, the material holds a lot of accumulated energy from the past. “Formed from the remains of dinosaurs, insects, and pine trees, it lay dormant until it was brought to life in the modern world. I describe the oil-charged brushstrokes in my paintings as “heavy simplicity”. The oil is applied in thin, translucent layers of brown, green, and gold so that the energetic weight remains illusory,” she said of the unusual material used in her work.
Andrėja Maiburovaitė graduated from the Painting Department at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is currently living in the Netherlands, where she is studying for a Master of Arts degree at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. She says that going there was a creative breakthrough and an encounter with creativity. “Leaving Lithuania to understand my context was a critical and decisive step in my development as an artist. My artistic education had focused on painting, meaning I only understood my work through the prism of painting. While studying in The Hague, I was introduced to other media that are sometimes more conducive to expressing complex ideas. Now, my work nourishes itself; painting is explained by a video or poetic text, and vice versa – they create a discourse with each other,” said Maiburovaitė.
She draws inspiration from lived experiences, the history of her family, and everyday domestic moments that are rich in politics and economics. These include divorce, illness, old age, miscarriage, and death. From an early age, she has had a tendency to poeticize these realities, and her creative tool for overcoming excess feelings is auto-ethnographic research.
“The symbolism of events becomes metaphors. For example, the hundred-year-old apple tree that fell in our garden last summer bore the most fruit and broke under its own weight in a storm. The inside was hollow. I am thinking about how I can translate that emptiness or the viscosity of oil into a developing story,” said Maiburovaitė, who is presenting her third solo exhibition on June 11.
A. Maiburovaitė’s exhibition Crude forms part of the Open Call project of the Meno Niša program Art Space for Young Artists, run by the gallery. The exhibition will run until July 4.
Financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture
Vilnius City Gallery Meno Niša is sponsored by Vilnius City Municipality
