Biography
I am Andrius Zakarauskas (1982), a member of the younger generation of conceptual painters; I explore
the medium of painting and the position of the painter in the context of contemporary art. In my early
work, as the artist, who graduated from the department of painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, for
the most part sourced my motifs from secondary realities: art history and film. In my later work, painting
emerged as a central theme. Using essential elements such as brush strokes, colour and composition,
I create a personal history of painting, in which the viewer becomes actively involved. In
my paintings, anonymous figures appear in schematic interiors, oscillating between the abstract and
figurative traditions of painting. In fact, these abstract figures are often myself, who
become a faceless army of creators, and sometimes a thrusting hand armed with a brush, and then
sometimes the brush stroke itself. However, this is not an expression of narcissism, which is often
characteristic of artists, but a consequence of the complete identification with painting, its traditions,
the process of creating, and materiality. It is only in this way that I can convincingly present the
complex nature of painting, and incorporate it into the field of contemporary art. I regularly complements
my series of paintings with drawings, works in glass, and small canvases with my own system
of symbols, by means of which he defines and gives meaning to the process of creativity.
I have had my work shown at the Vienna Fair (Vienna), Art Cologne (Koelnmesse) and
Cornice (Venice). I have had solo shows at the Michael-Schultz Gallery in Berlin and the Andreas
Binder Gallery in Munich. In 2009, I was the first painter to win the Young Painter Prize.
