The women in Ruta Jusionyte’s works remain women in their primeval form, a body incarnate, while men take on different forms in a versatile bestiary, alternatively deer, rabbit, bear or even Minotaur, each animal embodying a force or a virtue.

Exploring symbols and metaphors, the young Lithuanian artist is questioning our contemporary modes of relationships through contrasting concepts, alternating near and far, bond and distance, movement and stillness.

My main themes stem from the question: what is the place of the woman in contemporary society, what is a couple, what is a family?

These questions have been haunting me for the past few years and have led me to explore the states and status of the woman, the relationships between men and women and the place of the child in the context of new family settings.

But my work is first and foremost a questioning of artistic representation: what is it for a woman to paint and sculpt the body, and the body of the woman for that matter, the woman mother, lover, entrepreneur, artist all at once? What does it mean to stage a couple against the questions of parity and equality ? It’s a question that has been running through my mind and my work ever since I moved to France: what is it to be a woman, to be at the same time a wife, a worker, a lover and a mother?

My work is all at once a testimony and an exploration of the present state of relationships between men and women, their respective places within the ever changing configurations of the couple, especially in our contemporary world, with recomposed families. It is humanity that I represent through symbols and metaphors. There are multiple ways to interpret these symbols and characters, and my art is a way of translating and conveying meaning through symbolic forms.