Raminta Dirsytė-Urbonienė (born in 1998) is a painter who earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in painting from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Through her multi-layered paintings and spatial objects, she transforms fragments of reality into symbols. Through her reinterpretation of these fragments in her work, she attempts to create new forms of vision without overlooking small large events.
In 2025, she was awarded a scholarship for emerging artists by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. In 2019, she received the Justinas Vienožinskis Prize from the Department of Painting.
In 2022, Dirsytė-Urbonienė completed a year-long internship at the Joey Ramone Gallery in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, working as an assistant to the gallery’s owner and curator, Kiki Petratou. According to Dirsytė-Urbonienė, moving to a new context after completing her bachelor’s degree in painting transformed her relationship with the art world. “Once I entered the gallery world, I became familiar with its behind-the-scenes aspects – exhibition planning and implementation, curating, and art fairs. During those years, I visited the Art Brussels, Art Rotterdam, Art Antwerp, and Art Cologne art fairs and experienced the documenta 15 event. Working with curator Kiki Petratou, I got to know the multifaceted, rich life of exhibitions.”
These trips to large-scale art events and my consistent work at the gallery gave me the opportunity to familiarize myself with the field of contemporary art, see the diversity of works, meet the artists, and take a deep breath. At that time, a new, freer approach to creativity was emerging, and I started creating with whatever I had, recognizing the creative potential in everyday objects. However, being in a foreign context strengthened my sense of identity and connection to the place where I developed as an artist. In 2023, I returned to the Vilnius Academy of Arts to continue my master’s studies in painting. I incorporated the objects I had started constructing in Rotterdam into my creative process and returned to painting.
Raminta’s master’s thesis revealed her characteristic emphasis on the symbolism of objects and images through unexpected juxtapositions and meaningful gestures brought about by objects such as wedding dresses, birthday candles, and false eyelashes. These symbolic images – traces – function similarly to the motifs captured in paintings: metaphorical objects or phenomena that mark a certain way of seeing. What is particularly important is that the works “tell of a shift in vision as an event, of seeing as a change in meaning, an invention. They are not purely conceptual paintings, in which the idea is paramount, nor are they purely modernist paintings, in which reality is surface, color, composition, and form. These are exercises in seeing – forms of seeing that incorporate various artistic strategies and focus on analyzing the experience of seeing” (Monika Krikštopaitytė, Thesis Review, 2024).
My creative process is driven by my interest in the symbolism of fragments of reality. I am fascinated by how small, often simple objects and images can reveal hidden stories. I want to leave the viewer with a question: How do you see it, and why exactly like that? I am interested in how symbolic images connect with the unique assemblage of experiences residing in the imagination.
I believe that, like small stories, our lives are made up of fragments of major events. In my work, I collect traces of these significant changes and use them to piece together a picture of the whole. This emphasizes the importance of change and perspective, or point of view and angle of approach.
My work reflects the present world in a way that is characteristic of it – through intuitive knowledge, awareness of feelings and states, and observation of changes in perspective. I rely on the concept that knowledge is contextual – rooted in a specific place, body, and perspective. Different angles of vision provide access to today’s world, not through existing narratives, but through unique, constantly changing knowledge.