Every October, Vilnius pulses with creative energy as galleries, collectors, artists, and art lovers from the Baltic States and beyond gather under one roof. The occasion? ArtVilnius, the largest contemporary art fair in the region. Started back in 2009, the event showcases some of the very best emerging and established artists, taking particular interest in young creatives. Driven by a “universally democratic” ideal, ArtVilnius does not limit itself to works from Eastern and Northern Europe but presents a broader panorama of contemporary art, building a bridge between East and West.
This year, the fair took place between the 3rd and 5th of October, donning collecting as its main theme. For the first time, ArtVilnius gave this much space to the region’s various private and institutional art collections, highlighting their importance for creative production. Overall, the Fair brought together 80 galleries and art institutions, which showcased over 320 artists from 16 countries.
Here’s our carefully curated selection of 10 artists that caught our eye at this unique fair.
Elena Kanarskaitė
Elena Kanarskaitė (b. 1994) is a Lithuanian artist and graphic designer who moves between client commissions and independent artworks in her creative practice. Such a diverse approach lends itself to her choice of technique – Kanarskaitė combines different tools and media, like sound, textile, or video, to form multifaceted artworks that bridge sensory experience with critical inquiry.
Her latest exhibition, WAILING (Pamenkalnis Gallery, 2025), presented an interplay of sound, fabric, and light, linking different temporalities to engage with concepts of tradition as well as individual and collective memory. At this year’s ArtVilnius, Kanarskaitė showcased Desiring Machine (2023), a multimedia installation exploring the impacts of social media on human relationships. A testament to the artist’s broader creative interest in social connections, the work dives into the darker realms of dating apps, illuminating the paradoxes of online communication. Kanarskaitė holds a (very literal) mirror to contemporary society, highlighting aspects such as dissolving ethical norms of communication or the growing insecurity and self-policing around one’s presentation. In Desiring Machine, our endlessly connected world emerges and strikes as simultaneously more connected and more isolated than ever.
Linas Liandzbergis
Linas Lianzbergis (b. 1965) is a Lithuanian artist whose practice spans painting, installations, performance, and video. At the heart of his creative activity lies the idea of openness and connection, resulting in a technique that is both eclectic and ever-evolving. He bridges individual art production with curatorial work, championing a collaborative and interdisciplinary approach. Lianzbergis’s work seeks linkages between different fields and sensibilities to connect art with science, nature with technology – or to bring different artists together.
Following his studies in painting at Vilnius Art Academy, Liandzbergis became part of Žalias lapas (‘Green Leaf’), a group of young artists who pioneered postmodern forms in 1980s Lithuania. During this time, he produced various projects rooted in action and performance art with fellow creatives. The 2000s marked a return to painting form. It was then that Liandzbergis established his signature style of vivid colours and pop-art-like compositions.
Many of his works bring a collage sensibility to painting, disrupting idyllic landscapes with “stickers” of secondary realities. His practice casts a critical eye on the interaction between art and contemporary technologies, earning Liandzbergis a distinct spot in the contemporary Lithuanian art scene. His most recent works, like those from ArtVilnius ‘25 (where he was presented by the Audrius Gražys Art Gallery) or the recent exhibition at Arka Gallery in Vilnius, include painting translations of various affective states: from childhood memories and dreamscapes to anxieties of contemporary living.
Johanna Ulfsak
Johanna Ulfasak (b. 1987) is a textile artist and designer based in Tallinn, Estonia. Her work centres around traditional methods like hand-weaving, wood carving, and textile painting, creating space for slow-material work in the fast-paced contemporary reality. The artist prompts her audiences to reflect on the role of textiles, urging them to see beyond decorative or practical value. She explores themes such as gender labour, cultural memory, and material time, imagining textiles as vessels for memory, identity, and resistance. All the while, her merging of craft techniques with contemporary practices unsettles boundaries between disciplines.
Following undergraduate studies at the Estonian Academy of Arts, Ulfasak pursued education abroad, earning a Master’s Degree in Textile Design from Kolding School of Design, Denmark. She later expanded her creative horizons in Japan, where she learned Kasuri weaving and ancient plant dyeing techniques at Kawashima Textile School. The artist has also gained professional experience in the fashion and textile industry, working across different companies in Switzerland, Germany, as well as her home country. At ArtVilnius, she was featured in Olga Temnikova & Indrek Kasela Collection.
Merike Estna
The Estonian painter, Merike Estna (b. 1980), lives between Tallinn and Mexico. She integrates craft, installation, and performance into her paintings to push against convention, with her works enveloping surrounding environments (or even bodies), expanding the limits of painting. The artist, however, does not only transcend the canvas’s frames; she also unsettles the strict separation between fine and applied arts, borrowing palettes and patterns from the latter field.
In Estna’s creative practice, traditional canvases then give way to immersive environments. Paintings become lived spaces, where viewers can not merely observe, but inhabit art. Meanwhile, the marginalised, more feminine territory of applied arts mingles with masculine, ‘high-art’ painting. Estna then situates herself within a broader societal discourse, exploring the gendered dynamics of the art world – as well as local mythologies and histories. Her works were presented as part of the Olga Temnikova & Indrek Kasela Collection.
Kris Lemsalu
Kris Lemsalu (b. 1985) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working between Tallinn and New York. In line with her diverse educational background, Lemsalu’s work embraces hybridity and transformation. The artist reaches for various forms, techniques, and sensibilities, creating across sculpture, installation, as well as performance. Lemsalu’s works then figure between human and animal, natural and artificial, or, indeed, beautiful and repulsive.
She revises traditional art techniques – combining materials like porcelain with fur, wool, or leather, she creates multilayered installations eccentric in colour and texture alike. These marriages of found and handmade push the boundary between art and real life, speaking to the performative, theatrical dimension of her work. Lemsalu pulls viewers into a world of endless imagination, combining playfulness with critical inquiry into contemporary existence. She was showcased in the Olga Temnikova & Indrek Kasela Collection.
Vytautas Kumža
Vytautas Kumža (b. 1992) is a Lithuanian photographer and multimedia artist based in Amsterdam. For all his education in photography, Kumža does not trust the medium blindly. Though his work primarily falls under the ‘photography’ category, it employs a hybrid approach wherein installations and sculptures work alongside images. In fact, his pieces shine a light on the limitations of the medium. In his creative practice, the artist questions the relationship between reality and its representation, often unveiling the staging involved in image-making.
He takes on an archivist, conceptual approach, showcasing his inspirations and the production process. Kumža then invites his viewers to give a second look to familiar elements; to reconsider their qualities, to recognise the uncanny in the commonplace. His art suggests that what we see is often misleading – even when captured with the camera’s “objective” lens. At ArtVilnius, he was presented by The Rooster Gallery.
Vita Opolskytė
Lithuanian artist Vita Opolskytė (b. 1992) lives and creates in Vilnius, where she also teaches at the Academy of Arts. In her artistic practice, Opolskytė explores the various dimensions of everyday interiors. Taking “Alice in Wonderland Syndrome” as her reference point, she paints distorted perceptions of size and distance. The resultant marriage of different scales and perspectives challenges traditional modes of representation.
The artist then makes mundane materials strange – and, conversely, renders the strange cosy. Opolskytė invites her viewers to step into her dreamhouse, where the boundary between dream-induced disorientation and daily domesticity dissolves. Her work is an endless negotiation between all that is real and all that is constructed. At ArtVilnius, she was represented by The Rooster Gallery.
Eike Eplik
Eike Eplik (b. 1982) is an Estonian artist working between installation and sculpture, with her oeuvre presenting a whole microcosmos of technique. She reaches for materials like clay, wood, metal, or ready-made objects, mingling organic with the synthetic. This formal multiplicity echoes the artist’s thematic interest in biodiversity and its complex relationship to humankind; her work engages with variance on all levels.
Indeed, the artist takes on an all-encompassing approach: her installations can occupy entire gallery spaces, encompassing floors, walls, and ceilings to create immersive narratives. The verdant interiors of Eplik’s most recent exhibition, In Times When Everything Else Seems More Important (Kogo Gallery, 2025), for example, invite visitors to embrace their inner child. There, the artist creates a kind of “secret garden” wherein playfulness and youthful exploration win over the adult’s striving towards reason and control. She’s represented by the Kogo Gallery.
Sabīne Vernere
Sabīne Vernere (b. 1990) lives and works in Riga. Her practice stands at the intersection of bodily experience and mythic imagery. Best known for her India ink paintings, she has recently been drawn to new forms and materials like marble or installation. The artist’s limited, often monochromatic, palette remains in tension with her interest in the unlimited and undefined – the very fluid, anthropomorphic beings she puts on paper.
Female sexuality constitutes a core topic in the artist’s oeuvre. In projects like Bestiaries and Female Monsters, for instance, she investigates feminine monster myths, commenting on the ways femininity is constructed across the ages – from fear to fetish, from abuse to agency. At ArtVilnius, Vernere was presented by Kogo Gallery. She won the Best Young Artist award.
Miķelis Mūrnieks
Miķelis Mūrniek (b. 1995) is a Latvian visual artist based in the Netherlands. In his works, commonplace materials meet greater socio-historical narratives. The artist’s 2021 project, Visual Pleasure Theory, is an artistic inquiry into the male gaze and objectification of women. While pieces like AURORA (2020) or Art of Gambling (2019) comment on issues local to the artist’s birthplace.
Mūrnieks works with the fabric of everyday life – in Time Is Money (2020) and +371 63301000 (2019), for instance, he reconfigures ordinary objects like parking tickets or IKEA furniture to question the status quo. Social criticism stands alongside ready-made materials in Mūrnieks’s primary means of expression. At ArtVilnius, the artist was presented by PILOT, Experimental Art Space of the Art Academy of Latvia.
Contemporary Lynx was a proud media partner of ArtVilnius 2025.
