Monika Plentauskaitė. Exhibition "While I Was Waiting for Your Voice"

Monika Plentauskaitė (born in 1993) is one of the most interesting Lithuanian painters of her generation, consistently creating a unique visual world that intertwines memory, time, and questions of identity. In 2018, she completed her Master’s degree in Painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and in the same year, became the winner of the Young Painter Prize, one of the most important contemporary painting awards in the Baltic countries. Her works have been acquired by collectors in Lithuania and abroad, as well as by the MO Museum and other important art institutions and museums, and have been presented both in Lithuania and at international art fairs in Basel, Vienna, Berlin, and elsewhere.

Recently, M. Plentauskaitė’s painting has been enriched by her experience of motherhood, a theme that will be explored in the Meno Niša exhibition, While I Was Waiting for Your Voice.  Motherhood has brought an increased sense of tenderness, intimacy, and quiet inner reflection to the artist’s work. Her paintings become peculiar scenes of memory where reality meets dreams and fragments of everyday life take on an air of magical realism.  

For several years, she has been exploring themes of memory, identity, and the fictitiousness of photography and painting. The artist explores questions of identity, seeking answers in old photographs and attaching great importance to the recurring theme of hair. Using the tools of classical oil painting, she gives hair a central role in her paintings. 

According to the artist, her works do not speak directly. “I often depict people with their backs turned and their hair covering their faces. Hair becomes a metaphor for memory and identity here – it covers and accumulates memory, acting as a repository. In the background of the paintings, I depict draperies that resemble the rudiments of a stage or an imaginary performance. I seek uncertainty and an atmosphere of transience. Animals appear alongside people – sometimes they resemble guardians, at other times they appear like frozen exhibits or stuffed animals. These motifs are associated with the fragility of life and the intersection of life and death.”

Art critic Sonata Baliuckaitė Arlauskienė describes Monika’s work as being characterized by exceptional visual sensitivity. She delves into the layers of memory and identity by employing symbolic motifs such as hair, curtains, animals, and fragments of family narratives. These motifs enable the artist to connect personal experience with the broader human condition of closeness, fragility, and transience.

She is a painter who consistently develops her own unique visual world, combining inner sensitivity with subtle irony. Her paintings are characterized by unexpected symbols, humorous touches, and a playful imagination, offering a strange blend of magic and absurdity in everyday life. She is an artist who constantly reimagines memory and identity, creating seemingly quiet images that pulse with poetry and gentle self-irony.

Monika Plentauskaitė’s exhibition While I Was Waiting for Your Voice will be on display at the Vilnius city gallery Meno Niša until January 9. 

The exhibition is  financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
The Meno Niša Gallery in Vilnius is sponsored by the Vilnius City Municipality.