Rūtė Merk
Rūtė Merk
Promises
How are new technologies changing bodies, their representation and
the very concept of corporeality? What are the capabilities of
painting to reflect both the desires of our time and the promises
of technology? Employing the classical genres of portrait and still
life, in her paintings Rūtė Merk captures the conditions of the
contemporary world, characterised bythe shifting boundaries between
the material and the virtual, the natural and the artificial, and
the concrete and the abstract.
Although Merk's portraits flirt with the history of painting, they
are undoubtedly a testament to the era of tracksuit bottoms and
business casual suits rather than vestments and regalia.
Representative of today's pop culture, fashion and the specific
habits of the millennials, they stem from the artist's impressions,
fragmented memories, and a purposeful archaeology of digital
culture. Seamless at first glance, these portraits are made up of a
multitude of fragments of different bodies accumulated in the
artist's personal archive of digital images. Ariya's face is
borrowed from the character in the popular TV series Game of
Thrones, while the rest of the body is anonymous; Jomantė is
constructed from various image sources in an attempt to imagine the
typical employee of a successful art gallery, andends up being
named after the artist's best friend in school. Meanwhile, Yssa is
a loosely interpreted portrait of a Belarusian DJ based in Berlin.
Hovering in abstract backgrounds, these figures are characterised
by weightlessness. They attest to the artist's effort to 'embody
disembodiment', the effect suggestive of the constantly moving
boundaries of the subject when faced with a perpetually mediated
reality.
Several centuries ago, still life painters composed images of
hunting trophies, ripe fruit and flower bouquets, as they sought to
convey images of mortality,the cycle of life, and the wealth of the
middle-class. In Merk's still lifes, we find consumer products that
have become attributes of an aestheticized modern lifestyle and
economic prosperity. The latte motif, enlarged to the extent it
approaches abstraction, aspires to serve as an allegory of global
economic networks and the anxious culture of productivity. The
artist's paintings blur the distinction between the natural and the
synthetic. Imagery such as blue orchids that do not exist in
nature, or perfectly identical artificially bred fruit signify
engineered interventions into the most intimate spheres of
nature.
Two similarly composed portraits of Aki Ross, one of the first
computer-generated film protagonists, demonstrate the development
of the artist's style. In Spirits Within (2018), unlike the
expressive, gestural Greta (2015), the colours, visual effects,
figure modelling, and composition are reminiscent of images
generated by digital image editing software intended for on-screen
viewing, such as in video games and 3D animation. The dissolving,
blurry, out-of-focus, strangely uncanny backgrounds also appear as
if intended for the eyes of a machine rather than a human being.
The exhibition invites us to think not only about what we see but
also how we see under the light of on-screen suns.
Rūtė Merk (b. 1991) is a Lithuanian painter based
in Berlin. She graduated in painting from the Vilnius Academy of
Arts and Munich Academy of Fine Arts. She was the recipient of the
DAAD prize in 2023, and won the Audience Choice Award at the
JCDecaux Young Painter Prize. Her work has been shown in solo and
group exhibitions in New York, Shanghai, Berlin, Munich, Kyiv,
Vilnius and elsewhere. Her works are included in the collections of
MO Museum, Vilnius; M Woods, Beijing; ICA Miami, Miami; Musée d'art
moderne et contemporain, Geneva; Sifang Art Museum, Nanjing; X
Museum, Beijin.
Curator Inesa Brašiškė
Organizer National Gallery of Art
Coordinators: Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Austėja
Tavoraitė
Architects: Beatričė Mockevičiūtė, Mindaugas
Reklaitis
Graphic design: Gailė Pranckūnaitė, Laura
Grigaliūnaitė
Translated by Paulius Balčytis
Partners: VACANCY, TARA DOWNS, SIXCHAIRS
BOOKS
Media Support JCDecaux
