The Rooster Gallery will take part at international art fair ART DUBAI 2025 for the 10th time with exposition specially conceived for this leading international art event.

This year’s display presents the works of two painters, Egle Karpaviciute and Sandra Strele, reflecting on the format of the exhibition itself and inviting exploration of its possibilities and limitations. The artists’ works reveal fictional cultural situations that extend the exhibition space into real and imagined places, into times that never were, but which materialize within the rectangles of the canvases. Thus their paintings become a monument to painting, an illusory museum of images instituting its actual and fictitious pasts in the present over and over again.
In her work, Sandra Strele draws on the tradition of landscape and architectural landscape. Her large-scale paintings usually represent remote, alienated spaces – gallery rooms, playgrounds, studios, often surrounded by lush greenery. Strele’s paintings are characterized by an unexpected structure and an original visual logic, which confuses the viewer’s gaze by the discrepancy of different scales, contrasts of precise, rational, free and surreal shapes, complicated perspectives, and manifold intersections of spaces and planes. The narratives of Strele’s art unfold in series, focusing on the flow of time, which seems both real and abstract all at once, shifting back and forth between the reflections and memories of the past and the imaginary scenarios of the future, often marked by the permeating mood of melancholy and nostalgia, that manifest themselves as artworks, museum artifacts or other cultural objects. Rethinking (im)possible scenarios, the artist raises the question: what is this mysterious event that has changed the meaning of these places and spaces? And who is the observer?
Egle Karpaviciute is a relentless explorer of the culture field. Her works are visual commentaries on painting, history and art institutions: museums, galleries and exhibition spaces. The artist observes and captures culture and its changes, and speaks about the contemporary features of art presentation and the habits of its consumption, a painter’s and an artist’s identity, the role of the viewer as an art consumer and their (and her own) faith and doubts in painting. In her canvases she captures the spaces of prominent contemporary art museums and galleries (Guggenheim, Victoria Miro, David Zwirner, Gagosian and others), where she sometimes inserts and “exhibits” her own paintings. The series results in a fictitious documentation of exhibitions, blurring the boundaries between fact and illusion and revisiting the relation between painting and reality. Painted images become data storage devices of events that never happened – the exhibitions take place in the given venue only on the surface of the canvas. Thus, her works, while imitating a retrospective look, function as forgeries of time and are archived as existing facts through one of the most archaic art forms – painting.

Exposition will also include some new pieces from “The Bigfoot Project” by artist Tomas Dauksa.

The Rooster Gallery’s participation at the fair is kindly supported by
Lithuanian Council for Culture and Vilnius City Municipality