Juste Bernotaite

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Juste Bernotaite is a Lithuanian artist based in Belfast who utilises memories from the past to influence their work today. It is their desire to face the history of their habitats and explore its landscape, as well as their relationship to it. Through the use of paint, Bernotaite manifests the past into the present world, reviving it and bringing it closer to viewers of their work, inviting them to ‘walk’ through various hidden histories contained within each piece.

Working with imagery of both the natural landscape and historical photographs of urban spaces taken in their home country of Lithuania, Bernotaite uses textured surfaces, heavy layers of paint and fluid, chaotic brushstrokes to draw the past into the present. The specifically prepared surfaces and thick paint, mixed from pigments, help them to manifest the vague past into something material and real that has a presence of its own - a history that seduces viewers to come closer, to almost touch it and get lost in the work itself.