Gurčinas Kristijonas

Kristijonas Gurčinas (b. 2001) is a visual artist working in the field of painting, installation, and archival image research. In 2024, he completed his bachelor’s degree in
painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the same field. Since 2020, he has been actively participating in group exhibitions and creative workshops, has held a solo exhibition titled Saulašarė, and has co-curated the group exhibitions Ruja and Žarija.

In his creative practice, Gurčinas analyzes the relationship between contemporary visual culture and images symbolizing death, spirituality, and existential contemplation. He
is interested in how sacred symbols are transferred into the contexts of popular culture, fashion, and entertainment, becoming part of secular aesthetics and losing their original existential and spiritual meanings. This transformation of images in his work becomes a reflection of broader processes in contemporary culture, characterized by disbelief in the broad sense, superficial aestheticization, and irony.

In the artist’s practice, painting often transcends the traditional form of a painting and takes on an object-like, installation-like quality. K. Gurčinas creates painterly objects using
stretcher-free, nail-stretched canvases, emphasizing their physical presence in space and their fleeting nature. His work is based on a personal visual archive formed from online sources, museum publications, films, video games, and family funeral albums. This interdisciplinary method allows him to combine painting, image analysis, and archiving practices, searching for tensions between the original meaning of an image and its reinterpretation, sacredness and its imitation, authenticity and surface.

Witching Hour, 2025. Oil, acrylic on canvas, 130x170cm.

The reap, 2025. Oil, acrylic, aerosol spray paint on canvas, 100x80cm.

About Death and Pop, 2023. Aerosol spray paint, oil on canvas without a sub frame, 115x175cm.