Donata Minderytė is an artist currently residing and working between Vilnius and New York. She graduated from the Painting Department of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, earning an MA degree in 2016. In 2024, Minderytė successfully defended her PhD thesis at the Vilnius Academy of Arts, further enriching her academic achievements. Her works have been acquired by various museum collections, including Kiasma (Helsinki), MOCAK (Kraków), the Noewe Foundation (Vilnius), and Mo Museum (Vilnius).
Minderytė’s artistic practice revolves around the concept of visual translation, where she examines the significant changes that occur in an image as it is transferred from one medium to another. In her work, Donata Minderytė focuses on what is to be avoided in linguistic translation – moving away from the original, fading the initial meaning and altering the message. Minderytė uses photography or stills from daily life videos as a tool of memory. She translates these images into the medium of painting by creating a representation of visual entropy. Captured in paint, the images lose detail, intensity and contrast, thus leaving an interpretive space for translation. The finished painting is hardly an accurate representation of the moment that it was inspired by: deliberate translational error becomes a generalised substitute of a past event, but not its representation. The narrative of the past is replaced by new visual information that pops up, transforms, fades and dwindles to such a degree that it can become unrecognisable. A bleached painting style for Minderytė becomes an artistic method to speak about herself, one’s memory and the latter’s inevitability to become the faded past.
