Gabrielė Adomaitytė is a maximalist painter. Not because of the complexity of the compositional structure that takes shape on her canvases, but because, in her gaze, everything becomes painterly material: memories, photographs, diagrams, information, a Tintoretto - like perspective, the flames painted on the side of a SUV.
Ideas, things, and relationships cascade onto the painted surface, caught in a space-time whirlwind that scatters everything and yet holds it all together. Without any historical hierarchy, high and low references — obscure, erudite, or popular — pile up within the limited space of the canvas. The sphere of reality on which the artist works, however, is not the eternal present of postmodernism we have now left behind, but a future so accelerated that everything ages at the very moment it enters the space of representation.
Adomaitytė’s painting responds to questions that have by now become recurrent. The one concerning the limits of figuration and the nature of signs that underpin the research of artists such as Cheryl Donegan and Laura Owens; the one regarding the identity of images, around which Luc Tuymans’s canvases revolve; and the one concerning the digitization of the human hand that has engaged, among others, Wade Guyton, Albert Oehlen, and Jacqueline Humphries. But these questions do not merely circle around painting; they serve the artist as tools for examining how knowledge is organized and distributed through apparatuses, instruments, institutions, infrastructures, and technologies.
What follows is a fragment of conversation — imaginary, like all fragments of conversation reported by someone — that I had a few days ago with Gabrielė Adomaitytė.

What is the painting process for you?
I initially thought of painting primarily as an object within a sequence of works. I began seriously working with oil painting when I was fifteen years old. That is more than half of my life now. Early on, I was deeply committed to mastering a traditional medium such as oil painting. At a certain point, though, something shifted: I realized that I was no longer thinking about the gesture. Painting had become my way of thinking, through images and on images. Now I consider it a storage space for information that I can accumulate and study endlessly. Perhaps it is because of this analytical tendency of mine that Amy Sillman once told me that, even before being a painter, I am a drawer. Someone who thinks through images.

This way of thinking is reflected in your sense of composition.
Exactly! What I always try to create within my paintings is a system. I begin with an element that holds all the others together — an idea, a place, a mental image — and I study it through different sources of information: my memory, photographs, symbols, graphic patterns, and so on. The surface of the canvas builds up in layers that are all interconnected, some accessible to the viewer and others not. The painting discloses the methodology I follow in organizing information. In this sense, I believe I am influenced more by the visual logic of data analysis than by traditional art - historical composition. I am certain that sooner or later my work will also take on a more defined digital form.


Does your conception of pictorial space stem from that?
As in data analysis, spatialization in my paintings is also a strategy for representing conceptual relationships: first and foremost, my relationship with the object I am depicting. The closest precedent for this idea is perhaps Cubism, where the identity of an object is broken down and reassembled across the multiple perspectives from which it can be observed. My approach to representation is never imitative; instead, it transposes onto the canvas the interval between elements, with me acting as their mediator. If you like, it is a quantum conception of spatiality: space does not preexist things, but rather emerges as a property of their relations.

It makes me think that you often depict measuring instruments, particularly medical or diagnostic devices.
Most of my family members are doctors and pharmacists. I spent a lot of time surrounded by medical iconography as a kid. My fascination with, and also my fear of, this kind of machinery originates there. In my works, however, there is no desire to tell a personal story. I am more interested in examining how, for instance, the female body is constantly traversed by these devices.

Is yours also an archaeology of technology?
In part, yes. On the one hand, I am interested in the fact that the more cutting-edge a technology is, the more quickly it becomes obsolete. On the other, I am drawn to the point of contact between human subjectivity and the objectivity of machines. That’s why, for example, in a recent series I referenced the Sitterwerk Foundation’s Art Library in St. Gallen. In that library, visitors can leave books intuitively wherever they like after consulting them. A scanning robot tracks their location nightly, wherever they are placed. Within that space, order and disorder coexist at the same time.

Apart from a certain type of instrument, you also seem attracted to a certain type of institution.
I’ve long been interested in institutions of knowledge—especially those that aspire to contain human knowledge in its entirety. In Belgium, for example, there is a museum in Mons, Mundaneum, which has been described as a precursor to Google. When it was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, they used a card-index system there to catalogue everything on every subject that had been published in the world. It was a radical and ultimately utopian project that reached around ten million records. I think my paintings respond strongly to this kind of institution and to the notion of the transhistorical museum. It is as if I wanted to open up an infinite timeline on the canvas.

Tell us about this exhibition. It is your second solo show in Italy.
The series I’m presenting is titled Carrel 13 and continues a body of work I began in St. Gallen in 2024. I simultaneously collected references and painted over the course of more than a year. In numerology, thirteen is the number of subversion, while a carrel is a desk with lateral partitions still found in many libraries today. A small cell, designed to help one concentrate in the midst of others. I wanted to allude to the architecture of knowledge, to the point of intersection between gaze, archive, storage, and infrastructure. But also to this dimension of study — solitary and collective at the same time. The very dimension one enters when looking at a painting.


Gabrielė Adomaitytė (b. 1994, Kaunas, Lithuania) lives and works in Brussels and Vilnius. She holds a BA in Sculpture from Vilnius Academy of Arts (2017) and was an artist-in-residence at De Ateliers, Amsterdam (2017–2019). Recent exhibitions include Depositories (Editorial, Vilnius, 2026), Crude Hints (Towards) (Frieze No. 9 Cork Street with Ginny on Frederick, London, 2025); Abstraction (Re)Creation – 20 Under 40 (X Museum, Beijing, 2025); Breaking the Joints (Sapieha Palace, Vilnius, 2025); Chronicler (C L E A R I N G, Los Angeles, 2024); Telescope MAX (Gratin, New York, 2023); and Shallow Springs (Kohta, Helsinki, 2023).