Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. I know you think you’re superior with your obscure comments on the chromatic composition of works hung in your bourgeois salons. But today, we will talk about an artist who royally mocks your intellectual postures, while creating art that forces you to think despite yourselves: Laisvyde Salciute.
This Lithuanian born in 1964 in Kaunas is nothing like a conventional artist. She is more of a kind of visual storyteller who transforms the raw material of our image-saturated world into something new, strange, and deeply disturbing. If you came looking for pretty flowers or soothing landscapes, move along. Here, we are in a territory where classical references are diverted, where bodies metamorphose, and where children’s tales become nightmares for adults.
Salciute is a conceptual artist who navigates between several mediums: painting, installation, photography, engraving, drawing, and literary texts. Her recent work with the figure of Mélusine, a mythical creature, is particularly revealing of her artistic approach. In her series “Le Paradis de Mélusine”, she creates a visual universe based on Bayesian statistics, these mathematical formulas that calculate probabilities when only part of the information is available.
This mathematical approach is not accidental. It perfectly reflects our era, where we are constantly bombarded with partial information, fragments of images, bits of truths drowned in an ocean of digital “spam”. Salciute adopts a method she calls “ecological”: she recycles images and texts found on the internet, diverts them from their original context, and recomposes them according to the principle of paradox. The result? Visual tales for adults that present reality as an artificial construction.
The technique employed by Salciute is as unique as her vision. For her recent works, she begins by engraving on wood, then carefully transfers this engraving onto canvas with the help of a spoon, patiently rubbing the oil paint. Once the canvas is dry, she adds layers of acrylic paint. This laborious process, which demands monastic patience, is in itself a resistance against the instantaneity of our digital age.
When looking at “The Rape of Europe” (2019) or “Judith and Holofernes” (2019), one is immediately struck by the hybrid nature of the figures depicted. These characters with luminous eyes and halos reminiscent of religious icons are actually avatars of Mélusine, that European mythological figure who permeates all her recent work. Salciute constantly plays with the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, the mythological and the contemporary, the beautiful and the grotesque.
What sets Salciute apart from so many contemporary artists is her refusal of didacticism. She does not tell us what to think, nor does she bombard us with an explicit political message. On the contrary, she invites us to navigate her visual universe like a maze without a predetermined exit. Each viewer constructs their own story when faced with these works that function as distorted mirrors of our consumer society.
Salciute’s practice is rooted in an ancient artistic tradition while being resolutely contemporary. Her method of appropriating and diverting preexisting images recalls Dadaist collages, while her fascination with mythological figures evokes symbolism. But her art is anchored in the concerns of our time: hyper-connection, the overabundance of images, the illusory quest for happiness in a consumerist society.
In 2021, Laisvyde Salciute was the laureate of the Luxembourg Art Prize, a prestigious international contemporary art award, confirming the recognition of her work beyond Lithuania’s borders. This distinction is just the latest in a long list of prizes and grants that have marked her career since the 1990s.
The figure of Mélusine, recurrent in her recent work, deserves further attention. This legendary creature, half woman, half serpent, condemned to partially transform into a reptile one day a week, carries rich symbolism. She represents hybridity, the in-between, permanent transformation. By choosing her as the main character of her works, Salciute speaks to us about our own contemporary condition: we are all, in a way, hybrid beings, both physical and digital, constantly evolving.
If one analyzes her work through the prism of Jungian psychoanalysis, one can see in these hybrid figures a visual manifestation of our collective unconscious [1]. Jung saw in mythological symbols the expression of universal psychic structures. Salciute’s Mélusine, with her partially serpentine body, can be interpreted as a representation of the process of individuation, this psychic path leading to the integration of contradictory aspects of our personality.
This psychoanalytic reading is all the more relevant because Salciute constantly plays with notions of fluid identity and transformation. In her series inspired by Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando,” she was already exploring themes of gender fluidity and shifting identity in 2012. As Jung explained, the unconscious is not only a receptacle for the repressed but also a creative source. Salciute’s hybrid creatures seem to emerge directly from this creative unconscious, confronting us with our own shadow areas.
But Salciute’s work can also be read through the prism of feminist theory. Her representations of women-serpents, women-birds, women-monsters challenge binary categorizations and question traditional representations of the female body in art history. By appropriating mythological narratives such as “Judith and Holophernes” or “The Abduction of Europa,” she reverses usual perspectives and gives these female figures a new power.
In her essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Hélène Cixous called on women to “write their bodies” to free themselves from patriarchal discourses [2]. Salciute seems to answer this call by creating images of transformed, hybrid female bodies that escape restrictive definitions. Her Mélusines are not passive victims but active, ironic figures who look at us with intensity.
This feminist dimension of her work is particularly evident in a piece like “Space” (2019), where she depicts a ballerina launching like a rocket, simultaneously giving birth to tiny astronauts connected to her by an umbilical cord. This powerful image illustrates the contemporary woman, expected to excel professionally while embracing motherhood. Salciute does not offer us a simplistic critique of this double injunction, but rather a surreal and ambiguous visualization that invites reflection.
Salciute’s art is also marked by a strong narrative dimension. Originally trained as a children’s book illustrator (she received the IBBY award in 2006 for the best book of the year for young readers), she retained from this practice a keen taste for visual storytelling. But her stories for adults are much more complex and ambiguous than traditional tales. They function like visual riddles that each viewer must decipher with their own intellectual and emotional tools.
This narrative quality brings her work closer to that of certain artists she cites as sources of inspiration: Marcel Dzama, Barbara Kruger, or Grayson Perry. Like them, she uses images to tell stories that go beyond the strictly visual frame. Her art is “literary” in the sense that it summons narratives, characters, situations, while remaining deeply anchored in pictorial materiality.
Her latest exhibition, “The Bestiary,” presented at the Titanikas gallery in Vilnius in 2024, confirms this narrative orientation. In this series, she interprets the Anthropocene era through the lens of medieval bestiaries and Renaissance cabinets of curiosities. She tells stories of “eco-anxiety” and questions ironically the dichotomy between culture and nature. The result is what curator Laima Kreivytė calls “a reversed zoo” [3], where bipedal and quadrupedal creatures graze on canvas and paper, observed by the omniscient eye of a monkey, an elephant, a lion, or a swan.
This contemporary bestiary, where chimeras have become hybrids and centaurs “quadrobers,” is emblematic of Salciute’s approach. She blends scientific, esoteric, mythical, religious, literary, and artistic references into a paradoxical but coherent visual narrative. It is an art that demands active engagement from the spectator, a willingness to explore the multiple layers of meaning.
Irony is an essential component of Salciute’s art. Her works are often imbued with biting humor that defuses their dramatic potential. This irony is not gratuitous; it functions as a critical tool that allows us to distance ourselves from the images bombarding us daily. By recycling and diverting these images, Salciute helps us develop a form of visual immunity against the informational pollution of our era.
The art of Laisvyde Salciute is one of transformation and metamorphosis. Each of her works, whether drawn, painted, engraved, or animated, is in a state of permanent transition. It is not only the characters who transform (a woman and a serpent, or a woman-serpent), but the works themselves, which come together and diverge, expose their insides or hide behind pop visuals.
In a world saturated with prefab images and simplistic narratives, Salciute offers us a visual experience that resists passive consumption. Her art forces us to slow down, to observe attentively, to question what we see. It is demanding art, sometimes disturbing, but always stimulating. And isn’t that the essential function of contemporary art? Not to comfort us in our certainties, but to shake us up, to question us, to transform us in turn.
The next time you find yourself facing a work like “Silence Around Us” or “The Rape of Europe”, take the time to really look. Observe how Salciute diverts classical images to create something new. Notice the details in “Judith and Holofernes”, where her meticulous technique of wood engraving then transferring onto canvas creates unique textures. These works invite us to reflect on our own relationship to the images that surround us daily. Perhaps that is the strength of Salciute’s art: making us see our world differently, as if we suddenly discovered ourselves, in the reflection of a computer screen, bearing the same hybridizations and contradictions as her half-human half-animal characters.
- Jung, Carl Gustav. Man and His Symbols. Robert Laffont, Paris, 1964.
- Cixous, Hélène. The Laugh of the Medusa and Other Ironies. Galilée, Paris, 2010.
- Kreivytė, Laima. “The Bestiary: An Inverted Zoo”, exhibition text, Vilnius Academy of Arts, 2024.
