ARTIST STATEMENT
My work explores the tensions between geography and memory, built history and imagination, and reality and its reconfigurations. Through sculpture, time-based works, and site-specific projects, I investigate how fragile, impermanent, and subjective elements can counter the monumental.
My interdisciplinary practice is characterized by site-specific projects that examine the power dynamics between natural and urban spaces, as well as transmedia works involving spruces (picea) and firs.
Originally trained in sculpture, my work developed through years of exploration into material transformations. It began with extending sculpture into the medium of video through videoperformances and creating hybrid sculptural objects. While my primary interest remains rooted in cast materials, a passion tracing back to my study years, I increasingly crosslink and extend materials across media, integrating them into both solo projects and immersive, installative works. My work investigates the alchemy of matter – how it can carry memory, narrative, and a sense of presence, whether in tangible objects or in transmedia expressions. Through my work process, media itself becomes a sculptural element and a vessel for storytelling, connecting the physical, natural, and conceptual landscapes I seek to explore.
PROFILE
The visual repertoire of Germany-based Lithuanian artist Patricija Gilyte includes performative sculpture, video art and installation. She explores these media while mixing and interlacing, creating cross-relations between them. Patricija Gilyte graduated with a Master of Arts degree from Lithuania Art Academy, Kaunas Art Institute in 2000, and moved to Germany to continue her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. In her works she handles the topics of nature, landscape, human body and its connection to surroundings. Exploring the metaphor of “home” in her work she aims to evoke a binding feeling of place, which essentially always remains utopian. In particular, she has a strong identification with the North. Patricija Gilyte plays with references from numerous sources, including Lithuanian poetry and literary sources from the XIX century, landscape, geography, cultural traditions and its boundaries, ancient culture myths. Her work utilizes these different cultural phenomena in an open approach that embraces their relationships to each other. As a symbol of deep attachment to Lithuania, she intensifies, in her complex installations, the experience of a natural habitat and the process of detachment that arises from migration, and the viewer is allowed to participate in her experience. Patricija Gilyte often points out the importance of video medium, because it is an excellent means of storing and transporting information between different places or cultures. Supported by grants, Patricija Gilytes work developed during residencies and collaborative projects in Germany and other countries (Poland, Turkey, Lithuania and Greece) and has been shown in various exhibitions and video festivals.