The building by the Vilnelė River, which commemorates the first informal gatherings of Užupis artists, is home to a diverse community of artists: from photographers to painters, from sculptors to textile artists, from graphic designers and architects to interdisciplinary artists.
Composer and sound artist, who received her PhD from the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in 2024, where she researched and developed the notion of "reverberation" in contemporary music. Since 2014, she has been actively participating in group exhibitions, art and contemporary music, festivals and artist residencies in Lithuania and abroad. Her music for film has been awarded the national Silver Crane Award.
Although I am a ceramicist and experiment a lot with clay materials, photography, its old processes, drawing and writing complement the expression of ceramics in my creative field. The inner being of the human being, how it confronts the physical body, is my favourite subject. Such confrontations are not necessarily hidden under the notion of inner conflict, it's just a person. In the expression of my sculptures I actively use my knowledge of anatomy, and I add strands of surrealism. Serious themes are mixed with irony and wit. I seek the viewer's attention by surprising him.
Elena is a contemporary artist based in Vilnius, Lithuania. She is fascinated by the interaction between the physicality of clay and the intangibility of sound. Her work focuses on the creation of experimental aerophonic sound objects made of ceramic, producing buzzing and whistling sounds, forming a landscape of spatial air vibrations. While studying at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, she participated in various project activities, ceramic symposia and residencies.
Geistė Marija Kinčinaitytė (b. 1991) is an artist who uses photography and the moving image to explore notions of belonging, alienation and the unknown. Her work is characterised by an aesthetic of the uncomfortable and anxious, which combines the categories of the strange and the familiar, the distant and the close. Since 2014, her work has been actively presented in solo and group exhibitions in the United Kingdom (The Photographers' Gallery), Norway (Fotogalleriet), Lithuania (Sodų 4, Vartai, Atletika, Prospekto, Vilnius Pictures, Petras Domšaitis and Kaunas Photography Galleries, the Museum of Fine Arts, MO), photography and art museums in South Korea, Taiwan and China. Her work has been published in The British Journal of Photography, The Financial Times, Fotografija and Krantai magazines, NYX: a noctournal, S.KIN, A+A, H - The Notion of Humanist Photography, EEP Berlin Mag Vol. Yesterday and Today in.
G. Kinčinaitytė has been studying at Goldsmiths College, University of London, since 2010, where she obtained her BA and MA degrees in Media Studies and Film and Screen Theory. In 2023, she defended her PhD in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge.
Chinese-born American painter whose work explores the relationship between identity and environment through psychological portraits.
In his expressive paintings, Hao Shi searches for the boundary between modern calligraphic and traditional brushstrokes, between his different national identities and the Western culture in which he grew up.
Ieva Baltrėnaitė-Markevičė (born in 1991 in Panevėžys) - artist, designer, researcher with a PhD in fine arts, member of LATGA Association.
In 2017-2019 she completed her Master's degree in Textile Art and Design at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Founder and Head Designer of Textile Design Studio by Ieva (from 2020). For the last five years Ieva has been calling herself a garment detective. Although her entire creative path has revolved around clothes, she has never designed clothes themselves. Rather, she has translated them into works of art, reflected on them, explored them from different angles and experimented with them. In 2019 - 2024, she studied design at the Vilnius Academy of Arts as a PhD student and in 2024, after defending her dissertation "(Un)assembled collection secrets: reflection, interpretation and contexts of everyday life in Lithuanian women's clothing in the 1950s and 1980s", she was awarded the title of Doctor of Arts.
Exceptional motion graphics and graphic design professional, creating motion graphics and animation, video editing and illustration. Ieva's recent work includes large-scale educational animations, educational materials, documentaries and commercials.
Interdisciplinary artist combining theatre, contemporary dance, visual art and sound art performances. Kotryna is an active festival and concert organiser, creating and participating in artistic plays and performances. Kotryna's artistic style is interdisciplinary and inspirational; her work is dominated by a sense of community, inclusion and art for human well-being.
Professional actress, who has created over 40 roles in Lithuanian and foreign theatre and cinema. She has a Master's degree in Contemporary Sculpture and is a creator and performer of Lithuanian contemporary performance, combining her own sculptures and installations with her texts.
An artist who creates clothing collections, exhibitions and installations that are not perceived by sight, but by touch, hearing and smell. By presenting fashion and art objects in a non-visual way, the artist's work aims to give people with visual impairments the opportunity to experience fashion on an equal footing, and to help the sighted rediscover the value of the senses.
I am a musician combining elements of electronic and acoustic music. I started my musical career in the 1990s, when I started to create electronic music using various analogue and digital synthesisers. My musical style can be described as a mixture of different genres - electronic, jazz, funk and soul. I like to use live instruments such as guitar, bass guitar and drums, which I combine with electronic rhythm sounds and samples to create a unique sound. My work is enriched by collaborations with vocalists, rappers and instrumentalists.
The subject of my paintings is the Lithuanian landscape. Why Lithuania? Because no other country's landscape will be so painfully familiar, so felt and understood as my own. The artist's aim is to draw the ordinary person's gaze to what he or she might not notice. I have chosen to observe the beauty, ordinary or extraordinary, in our landscape. In painting, I delve into the space of the image and the structure that constitutes it. I look at the visual landscape as if it were a stage with scenery.
My music includes both traditional and archaic wind instruments, of which I have mastered more than 50. Every time I appear on stage, it is as if I am inviting the audience on a colourful journey where the sound treasures of the Baltic and Scandinavian worlds merge. Together with the Saulius Petreikis World Orchestra, a group that combines the World and Folk genres, we have visited most of Europe. My music is warmly received by a wide range of audiences, and is especially loved by families. In addition to performing, I also focus on education and the popularisation of old Lithuanian instruments.
Textile artist from Lithuania. I am interested in innovation, materials and human mind.
Smaragdo mestas is a dynamic children and youth centre, with kindergarten services, exciting festivals, activities and fun camps. Smaragdo miestas has set up a handicraft shop, where works by foreign and Lithuanian artists are exhibited and sold. To enrich the community, the Emerald City team organises many cultural events and since 2010 has been leading the annual art and music festival Gaia Gathering, supported by the Lithuanian Culture Council. The activities of this development team also include the pioneering Art Forest project, which brings together a wide range of artists and creators to promote collaboration and inspiration under one roof.
A visual artist from Australia who has studied and resided in many European countries, she is currently studying for her PhD at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Sophie's artistic practice includes sculpture and performance, through which she explores representations of memory.
I've been doing ceramics since I was a child, so clay is a very familiar material for me. I graduated with a master's degree in sculpture from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, and I am currently working on contemporary minimalist ceramics - I am the founder of the brand Abijum Keramika. My creations bring a sense of calm, cosiness and warmth to everyday life. You can see my work in my clay-scented studio, located right on the banks of the Vilnelė River.
Agnė Dautartaitė-Krutulė is one of the most renowned book designers in Lithuania, whose publications inevitably take part in the annual competition of the Most Beautiful Books, organised by the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture, and (usually) inevitably win prizes. And not just once. She is also one of the strictest (in terms of her attitude towards books) and at the same time one of the most subtle. Each time she looks at a book as a separate, unique case; each book seems to be unique, existing here and now, and it is now that it needs special attention and special time. For each book, Dautartaitė-Krutulė tries to find and finds a unique form.
I am a young generation journalist and documentary photographer, and in this field I am continuing the traditions of Lithuanian humanistic photography. My work explores sensitive social issues: military conflicts, political unrest, humanitarian crises. My photographs have been published by world-famous news agencies such as The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Der Spiegel. My documentary photography is guided by humanistic values and worldview, and against the backdrop of dramatic historical events or particular social circumstances, I try to see humanity, youth, beauty or even feminine tenderness.
I am a freelance artist and illustrator, working and living in Vilnius, Lithuania. After graduating from Vilnius Academy of Arts, I started working in creative industries - advertising, graphic design, product design, as well as visual arts. Now I really focus on traditional graphic design and illustration.
I am a sculptor, jeweller, graduated from the Faculty of Design of Vilnius Academy of Arts in Telšiai in 2007, majoring in jewellery and blacksmithing. I started my work with jewellery objects, later I moved to larger sculptural forms. My works are small in size, with smooth surfaces, jewellery-like, often with a matt, silver-plated surface. My work is dominated by human beings who speak of human relationships. They have their own worlds - oases: a ball or an island on which they stand, lie, sit, kneel. Sometimes these worlds are lonely and wistful, and sometimes the opposite is true: the beings are strong, optimistic and driven - boldly stepping into change.
From the North to the Middle East, this is the latitude where I have known creation.
After much experimentation in search of a true drawing, I settled on an abstract but expressive mix of geometric shapes and graphic elements.
The main theme of the series is the unleashed subconscious and inner reflection.
I do not limit myself to traditional art, I also create digital minimalist, sometimes slightly surrealistic illustrations, and I am attracted to experimentation and spontaneity without conceptual limits.
Vilnius, Lithuania-based visual artist who creates images using a variety of techniques and mediums such as digital drawing, painting, sculpture, filmmaking, creative writing and bookbinding. She is fascinated by the human body and soul; pleasures, anxieties, jokes, what we can and cannot see.
Dan Hermouet (Nantes, France) is a visual artist based in Vilnius where he is a resident artist at the Uzupis Art Incubator. His practice explores and researches hand applied historical analog photographic processes in the digital age. During his residency Dan has been focusing on eco sensitive creative processes. In 2021, he was awarded a scholarship by the Lithuanian Council of Culture to focus on researching pigments; the outcomes of this project have been developed further into the production of new artworks and shared during workshops held locally in Panevezys and Vilnius. Dan has exhibited in Lithuania, the Baltics, notably the exhibition ‘ego’ at the Rothko Museum, Daugavpils, Latvia as well as abroad. Dan is a member of the Lithuanian Interdisciplinary Artist Association. This year Dan is pursuing a residency art program at Užupio meno inkubatorius focusing on eco sensitive creative processes. He is currently working on a new natural and sustainable project alongside the national botanical garden for 2024.
My paintings are intellectual, sensory and subconscious reflections, echoing direct experiences and perceptions of outer and inner life. One could say that it is an effort to explore the contents of my brain and mind. I use all the expressive techniques I know and have access to: pittura metaphisica, intuition, surrealist vision, assemblage, Dadaist irony, and others that I can no longer even trace.
Original handmade ceramics by Elena Alekseeva.
I was born in 1967 in Vilnius, studied at the M. K. Čiurlionis Art School, graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Vilnius with a degree in graphic arts, teach at the VDA Painting and FAMM and Animation Departments, have participated in group exhibitions and have held more than 20 solo exhibitions. I curate exhibitions, plein-airs and the "Literatai Street Project".
In 2005 I graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Vilnius Academy of Arts in Telšiai, majoring in sculpture. I am introverted in my work, I create spontaneously by sketching, then I realise the selected suitable works by reaching for materials. My works are dominated by standing and sitting abstracted human figures, creatures reminiscent of animals or plants, sometimes transformed into geometric shapes, soft, angular, dynamic, others frozen in movement. In my work, I explore questions of human origin and the meaning of human existence, so the works are often philosophical, reflecting emotions and dilemmas of being.
Painter from Tbilisi, Sakartvelo. His work is inspired by mountain landscapes and the environment where he grew up. Currently, the artist is focusing on war-related themes.
For me, jewellery is a constant search for the perfect combination. Experimenting with precious metals, raw stones and unconventional organic materials, I look for ways to combine them into wearable works of art that express a unique wholeness on the human body.
I am a watercolour artist, who graduated from the Department of Site-specific Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in 2020 and joined the Lithuanian Artists' Union in the same year. The primary subject of my work is about the relationship between things and people. In my works I usually depict interiors accumulated with objects - rubbish. However, I do not limit myself to painting only, I try to realise various ideas that require other expressions, such as installation, sculpture, video or animation. I am interested in absurdity, irony and the contextuality of the work.
Marius Abramavičius-Neboisia was born in Vilnius, grew up in Vilnius and often lives in Vilnius, but even more often he travels to countries both distant and nearby. Marius has had over 60 solo exhibitions in various parts of the world. He likes to build stone pillars, catch the wind with his kites and fly huge paintings-flags into the sky.
Today, the painter, photographer, traveller, writer, poet and kite master Marius Abramavičius-Neboisia can be found in Užupis and Tibet, Azerbaijan and Greece. He can also be met on journeys of the soul.
A singer-songwriter, with a distinctive musical style and image. Miglė studied jazz vocals at Vilnius University. She is known not only for her music, but also for her distinctive image, her stage decorations and her candid stories about her life.
Monika Gedrimaitė is a new generation ceramicist, a graduate of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, a member of the Lithuanian Artists' Union. In 2018, the artist was awarded a diploma for her philosophical interpretation of the theme of the vessel at the 5th Vilnius Ceramic Art Biennial "Vessel Vision".
Exploring the world through touch, I use traditional textile techniques to try to capture different phenomena. Hand weaving and knitting are archaic crafts with a clear grid, which I use as a basis for narrative. By presenting my work in an installation format, I aim to create intimate spaces where different experiences and their participants intersect.
A painter, whose works are characterised by a chaotic system of images, surrealistic elements, a tendency towards the absurd, a constant balancing act between the real and the unreal, between beauty and ugliness. He draws inspiration from 15th-16th century Central European paintings and some contemporary painters.
His works breathe a unique life into ordinary, everyday objects, the layers of everyday experience lying on the canvas. Begert's work speaks of the beauty that lies in the quiet nuances of everyday life.
The artist came to Užupis Art Incubator as part of a creative exchange programme between Vilnius and Düsseldorf.
OKARUKAS is the only butoh dance theatre collective in the Baltics, which was formed in 2017 by Paris-based artists Sakurako, a Lithuanian choreographer of Lithuanian origin who has been living and working abroad for 20 years, and Phil Von, a French electronic music composer and performance artist, with the involvement of a young generation of Lithuanian actors, dancers and performance artists working together in 2017.
In 2012 Sakurako founded the butoh dance company Re-United Now-Here, whose performances have been successfully presented in the Netherlands, France and Japan. In 2015, after Sakurako moved to an artistic residency at the Château Éphémère in Paris, Re-United Now-Here was registered as a dance theatre in France. In 2017, after leading butoh dance workshops in Lithuania, she decided to move the company to Lithuania and work with Lithuanian dancers. This is how OKARUKAS Butoh Dance Theatre was born and since September 2017 Sakurako has been active in Lithuania and teaches Butoh dance at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre.
I came to photography from the world of cinema. I have been working with film editing for a long time, I am an editorial director. Working with moving images has obviously taught me to think, to see, to select and to respect the "frame": after all, the photographic frame is part of every film frame. But the miracle of photography is what I call the "catch" - the frozen moment that becomes a story right there. The closest thing to it for me is the documentary quality of photography. That's why I always keep my camera close by, because you never know... I often photograph my surroundings, people I know.
I have been a tattoo artist for more than 20 years. I draw inspiration from archaic cultures, their dominant symbolism and traditions related to tattoo art. I am one of the pioneers of the unique Japanese "Irezumi" style of tattooing in Lithuania, which covers large areas of the body.
I am a visual artist and researcher. My work is centred on materiality, which I explore using earth-based (inorganic) and botanical (organic) pigments. In my creative explorations I combine traditional methods of pigment extraction, their interpretations, the field of geology and (al)chemical processes of material transformation.
I am currently studying for a PhD in Art at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
SPACES SPACES SPACES is a duo of interdisciplinary artists Agnė and Oskar Stirniai. Their work is characterised by a sculptural empowerment of the elements of nature and their combination with mechanical means. The artists' concepts often delve deeply into environmental challenges and social paradoxes.
My entry into photography was quite simple and very human - like many young photographers, I bought my first camera when I was 23. However, as a photographer I was "born" when I discovered film photography with my first film camera. As soon as analogue film came into my hands, I was immediately drawn to the everyday person. To tell their stories, to listen, to travel and to search.
After graduating in painting from the Vilnius Academy of Arts, Tadas works intensively in his studio. With expressive layers of paint, a delicate combination of colours and halftones, a sensitive language of symbols and motifs.
This is the basis of Tadas Tručilauskas' work.
"It seems that by mixing colours, making strokes, playing with matter, I communicate with nature and God. For me, painting is both work and rest, like an absolute meditation."
Ulrike's work uses ready-made everyday objects, which she transforms by the way they are presented: by hanging them up, by stretching them, by combining different elements that maintain the integrity of the material. Ulrike's work is dominated by the use of textiles, which, according to the artist, act as a medium of meaning and as a material that transforms space and creates it. Combining different media - drawings, collages and textile wall pieces made of photographs and carpets - is Ulrike's way of finding connections between different realities and levels of perception.
Vilija Kvieskaitė is a graphic designer whose work can be seen travelling with people in the city. She smiles when she sees a bag, a reflector or a badge of her own design wandering the city. She started her career as a designer at the publisher of children's literature "Nieko Rimto", and being a designer meant a lot of responsibility for her - "A book is the most honourable thing in publishing for me. I remember how excited I was when the first edition of my first book arrived - I kept looking out of the window as boxes of books were being loaded out of the lorry, lots of boxes! And then I ran to the warehouse to open the first box", says Vilija.