A solo exhibition at Pamėnkalnio Gallery is one of the awards granted to the winners of the international event Young Painter Prize. Last year (2024), the competition was won by Tadas Truchill.
The exhibition consists of a series of large-format paintings arranged in the form of a foldable altar. Here, painting functions not only as a medium but also as a ritual – a vessel capable of accumulating time and stories. The altar is not presented as a Christian attribute, but as a machine of images and time: a space where the past, present, and trajectories of the future intersect. The artist constructs his own iconography from fragments of art history, personal memory, dream logic, and everyday life. Classical imagery – from Raphael to Velázquez, from mythological sculpture to icons of Lithuanian painting – is absorbed into the painter’s imagined space, where figures begin to dance, dissolve, turn into whirlwinds or ripples of water. Nothing remains still: bodies exist in a state of constant transformation, while images keep layering and recreating themselves.
In Truchill’s work, the act of painting becomes an attempt to bridge different dimensions of time. Reflections, moonlight on the surface of water, and other metaphors of doubling evoke the sense that reality exists across multiple planes at once – visible and experienced, open and concealed. The masculine and the feminine, the sacred and the mundane, beauty and brutality coexist like two energies threaded into a single body – the “altar”. The painting becomes architecture: it carries memories, experiences, tension, visions, and pain. The mythological figure of Atlas transforming into a self-portrait attests to the burden carried by the contemporary Atlas-artist – the weight of the image being created, the fractured marble of reality, the collapsing vault of the world. Painting becomes a practice of endurance, and a state of sacredness.
Tadas Truchill: “For me, painting is a noble act, demanding countless days of selfless dedication. My studio becomes a sacred space a cathedral or shrine where the act of painting transcends mere creation and becomes a dialogue with time itself. Over the past few years, I’ve been particularly drawn to revisiting and transforming earlier works, layering new brushstrokes and ideas. This practice is both constructive and destructive, as I reimagine past works, revealing and concealing different experiences that have accumulated inside and outside the studio.”
Organiser: Pamėnkalnio Gallery
Partner: Young Painter Prize
Financed by: Lithuanian Council for Culture, Vilnius City, Lithuanian Artists’ Association
