Emilis Benediktas Šeputis (b. 2000) is a painter of the young generation who completed his bachelor’s studies in painting at the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2023. Since 2019, he has been participating in creative workshops and art projects. From 2021, he has been involved in group exhibitions, both as a participant and a curator. In 2023, he became a finalist in “Zabolis Art Prize” painting competition. The artist’s works are found in private art collections in Lithuania and abroad.

Šeputis’ creative work is inspired by various iconographic traditions from different periods. Drawing on childhood experiences when various cards and playing cards were objects of collecting, trading, and games, the painter accumulates the analog of his card collection in the medium of painting. His works often replicate the structure of these cards, their main elements (image, title, description) are appropriated from different historical sources, merging into new semantic formations, testifying to the fragmentary and collage-like nature of contemporary visual culture.

By combining images from different epochs – ranging from medieval Christian imagery to the pop culture of the 90s and Japanese animation – the artist creates his own systems of signs, producing dense visual narratives infused with meanings and contexts. Magic, mysticism, ancient allegories, and mysterious religious symbols, as well as details from classical art, intertwine in his works with anime, manga characters and plots, pop culture quotations, and the aesthetics of the last three decades of television and the internet. The new stories born from these connections, like contemporary incantations, speak of unstable, changing meanings of images, their excess, devaluation, at the same time paradoxically emphasizing what is universal, important, and iconic in culture, readable and understandable regardless of the temporal distance.