About the Competition

The Young Painter Prize (YPP) is celebrating 17 Years of Emerging Baltic Art and returns in 2025 reaffirming its status as the most prominent art competition for young artists in the Baltic states. Since its founding in 2009, YPP has served as a vital platform for discovering and promoting the most promising painters from Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and since 2022, it has also welcomed young Ukrainian artists in solidarity with Ukraine’s ongoing fight for freedom.

At its core, the YPP competition aims to present a vibrant and diverse Baltic identity to the global cultural scene. It encourages young artists, aged 18 to 33, to explore their creative roots while engaging in critical dialogue with contemporary art movements. The competition fosters meaningful exchange within the region and provides opportunities for artists to grow professionally through visibility, recognition, and community engagement.

This year, YPP reached an exciting new milestone – for the first time, the finalists’ exhibition will be held across all three Baltic countries. The main exhibition opens at the Latvian Academy of Arts Gallery in Riga (Latvia), followed by satellite showcases at Pragiedruliai, the exhibition branch of the Stasys Museum (Lithuania) and Tartu Art House (Kunstimaja) in Estonia. This expanded reach not only strengthens regional ties but also provides broader access for audiences, collectors, and art professionals.

A distinguished panel of five international art experts will evaluate the submitted works and select 20 finalists, whose art will form the centerpiece of the 2025 exhibition cycle. Beyond the gallery walls, the YPP team will also facilitate artist talks, curatorial tours, and professional networking events to nurture deeper engagement between artists and the global art community.

As a non-profit initiative, the Young Painter Prize (YPP) is made possible through the efforts of dedicated organizers, ambassadors, and partners—including long-term patrons and sponsors from both the private and public sectors. These collaborations ensure YPP’s long-term impact and sustainability, while empowering the next generation of Baltic artists.

Whether you are an emerging painter, an art lover, or a cultural institution, YPP 2025 invites you to take part in shaping the future of Baltic art.

The 17th Young Painter Prize begins!

The Young Painter Prize (YPP) is thrilled to announce the official opening of its 17th annual competition.

Eligible applicants must be aged 18 to 33 and working in traditional painting techniques. In addition, all applicants must be either residents of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or Ukraine, or citizens of these countries living abroad.

From all eligible entries, a jury of five esteemed art professionals will select 20 finalists to exhibit their work at the Art Academy of Latvia in Riga from October 30 to November 24, 2025. The exhibition will then travel to:

  • Pragedruliai, Lithuania (partner of Stasys Museum) — December 4, 2025 to January 19, 2026
  • Tartu Kunstimaja, Estonia — January 30 to March 3, 2026

The deadline for submissions is September 7, 2025.

For more information, please visit https://ypp.art/application/

2025 Winners

Congratulations to this year’s Young Painter Prize winner, August Joost (Estonia), and to the 2025 Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment recipient, Ieva Kampe-Krumholca (Latvia). Honourable mentions were also awarded this year to Katrīna Levāne (Latvia), Stefan Stoikov (Ukraine) and Mantas Valentukonis (Lithuania).

Young Painter Prize 2025 winner

Young Painter Prize 2025 winner

August Joost (b. 2003 / EE)

The Solar Anus, 290 × 140 cm, two panels / oil on canvas / 2024

The Solar Anus is an oil painting on two monumental panels of linen canvas, stretched on wood frames, 290 cm tall and 140 cm wide. A figure group defines the visual field of each of the panels. The dark background in the centre of the painting is bounded by an increasingly vibrant red towards the edges.

On the left, an intestinal form descends to become a pair of partial male bodies merged in a struggle, who nevertheless fail to separate themselves fully, as the slick, undulating texture of internal organs reasserts itself over the distorted musculatures. The intestine proceeds from the top left corner of the painting in successive tones of grey, green, blue and pink, which appear pastel over the dominant dark tones of the rest of the painting.

As it approaches the centre of the panel, lumps of smooth muscle begin to form into the shape of an inverted upper torso, reaching its right arm to meet the second figure below, his neck terminating at the second figure’s thigh. We see the lower figure from the back, as he hangs by the legs, curling up his upper body towards the higher figure, his arm and upper torso returning to an increasingly intestinal form as it fades into the background.

On the right panel, a mass resembling the inside of an abdomen fills the lower right quadrant. Unlike the group on the left panel, this one is rendered in muted, dark tones. Three partial figures on top of each other suggest themselves in the folds of the intestinal wall. The lowest one lies in the fetal position, with a knee and the top of a bald head pointed towards us. We see the middle figure from the back, pushed to the right of the composition by the weight above. The group is capped off by a female figure of whom we see the knees and the side of the torso.

On the left vertical third, slightly above the figure group, there is a yellow glint, suggestive of a star. The star pierces through the darkest part of the background, which is nearly black.

2025 Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment winner

2025 Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment winner

Ieva Kampe Krumholca (b. 1992 / LV)

Ariadne’s Clue – follow the light of your heart, 120 × 100 cm / oil on canvas / 2025

To understand the message, you need to know the Greek myth about Ariadne. The Cretan king Minos had a labyrinth next to the palace of Knossos, where the monster Minotaur lived. Every 9 years, Athens had to sacrifice 7 young men and 7 virgins to this monster. Once among these young people was the brave Athenian prince Theseus, who was determined to kill the Minotaur and break this harsh tradition of sacrifices. He came to Crete to face his challenge. But he was met by Minos’ daughter Ariadne and she fell in love with the brave man. No one had ever come out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth alive – not so much because of the Minotaur, but because of the labyrinth – it was extremely complicated. To prevent this from happening to Ariadne’s beloved Theseus, she gave him a ball of thread, and advised him to tie the beginning when entering the labyrinth. Theseus did so. He went into the labyrinth and with all his youthful strength and courage defeated the Minotaur, and with Ariadne’s thread he emerged from the labyrinth as the absolute winner. Since Ariadne had betrayed her father by helping Theseus, she had to flee Crete with him. He promised to marry her, but on the way to Athens, they stopped at the island of Naxos, and during the night, while Ariadne was sleeping, Theseus left her. So Ariadne lay on the rocks, pulling out her broken heart and grieving for Theseus’ betrayal. This is how Dionysus – the god of wine, chaos and ecstasy – found her and fell in love with her in an instant. He married her and he gave her a crown of stars, so that her name would be forever inscribed in the sky as a constellation. Theseus, though the winner, didn’t fare so well in the rest of the story, but we won’t continue about him this time… What is this story about?

The labyrinth in which the Minotaur lived is each of our inner worlds, and the monster is our unconscious shadow side, which we must confront or sacrifice forever. However, the story of Theseus tells us that these are not battles that can be won only with strength, courage and ambition. The Minotaur can perhaps be defeated that way. But it is the feminine, intuitively sensitive side that will lead you out of the labyrinth of the inner world, which everyone must find within themselves. We need both sides. So please – do not be like Theseus, who after a grand victory gives up this intuitive power as something insignificant, unimportant; be like Dionysus, who loves it in all its shades. Be like Ariadne – a symbol of the inner light that will lead you through difficulties. Let the light in the painting and your inner intuitive wisdom be your guidance.

Young Painter Prize 2025 Honourable mentions

Young Painter Prize 2025 Honourable mention

Katrīna Levāne (b. 2001 / LV)

forest floor, 7 canvases 160 × 210 cm (full size 160 × 1470 cm) / oil on canvas / 2025

“I have always yearned to return to nature. If only I could stay there, take root in the forest floor from autumn through winter, perhaps death would not seem so terrifying.”

The artwork addresses the fear of death through oral folklore and the ecological aspects of death. I aim to create a space where death is recognised as a normal, albeit unpleasant, part of life.

This interdisciplinary composition serves as a meditation on the fear of death. The mythological forest depicted in the painting establishes a sense of a location suspended between life and death, in space and time. Accompanying scents and sounds enhance the atmosphere, evoking associations with nature that feel slightly off, resulting in an uncanny mood. Viewers are invited to immerse themselves in this environment and explore their feelings regarding mortality.

Questioning a person’s relationship with death and grief was prompted by my own experience – the inability to emotionally process what happened and a complete disconnection from reality. This freezing of myself in time created an inexplicable confusion and pain that I could not articulate. Talking about death is not normal – this was taught to me from an early age by the environment around me. Coming from a very superstitious family, there was an unspoken rule that simply talking about death could somehow invoke it.

The topic of death did not interest me; it scared me. The fear was so pronounced that I could not imagine death without feeling the need to knock on wood 3 times or spit over my shoulder. During my studies, I have begun to address topics of interest to me through folklore, creating my own personal mythology, which mixes aspects of folklore, superstition, and natural rhythms.

My goal with this artwork was to create a comforting space to deal with uncomfortable feelings. Everything that I choose to include in the space is meticulously made to serve a purpose of slight discomfort, but with a willingness to participate in it. The storytelling nature of these paintings is ambiguous, not quite telling the viewer what they should be feeling, but being a place onto which feelings can be projected.

Young Painter Prize 2025 Honourable mention

Stefan Stoikov (b. 1997 / UA)

Holiday Worry, 150 × 120 cm / canvas, oil / 2025

A homage to the engraving by Albrecht Dürer “The Knight of Death and the Devil.” The painting is about how life in Ukraine changes the idea of holidays in times of war. For me, this painting is a semantic and visual inversion of Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “The Knight of Death and the Devil,” where the protagonist does not oppose death at all and goes against it. In this variation, the woman seems to be running away from it because she wants to live without embarking on the path of war. This reveals the mood of ordinary people in Ukraine who just want to live and celebrate the holidays as usual.

Young Painter Prize 2025 Honourable mention

Mantas Valentukonis (b. 1998 / LT)

gl(azure) sky, 210 × 150 (diptych) / oil on canvas / 2025

The technological and information revolution has activated hybrid transformations of spirituality. In his book Techgnosis, Erik Davis writes of an “electric fire,” a primordial light that permeates matter and animates it. This light is not merely an optical event but a fluid, spiritual substance hidden within the core of technology itself – a substance that binds spirit and matter.

To think and paint light is inseparable from the tradition of painting itself. As the anniversary of Lithuanian classic M.K. Čiurlionis passes, I reflect on his visions of cosmic light and landscapes as thresholds between material and spiritual dimensions. Against this background, another echo emerges from contemporary culture: the 2008 video game The Void (Ice-Pick Lodge), where color is not simply pigment but life force. In that monochrome world, color appears as a membrane, a lymph-like substance flowing through bodies and environments. To lose color is to lose vitality; without it, one simply dies.

The diptych unfolds in this atmosphere – like sunset and inferno at once – embodying a mood of apocalyptic anxiety. The surface is saturated with crimson tones and layered contexts: a spectral angel-flower remade from the enigmatic Voynich manuscript. This mysterious pre-Renaissance codex, discovered in 1912 by the Polish-Lithuanian antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, is filled with illustrations of unearthly plants. Alongside it appears the fragile wire fence borrowed from the aforementioned video game The Void, and the faint apparition of an AI-generated wolf, flickering between vision and machine dream.

This layering recalls the process of transillumination used in painting restoration, where ultraviolet light reveals what lies hidden beneath the surface – dead layers glowing in fluorescent reds, greens, and blues. Here, too, light acts as revelation, exposing the strata of images, histories, and half-forgotten myths embedded in the painted field.

2025 YPP Catalogue

2025 Press Articles

2025 Finalists

We are excited to share that this year’s Young Painter Prize received an impressive 157 submissions!

Given the outstanding quality of the entries, we have selected 25 finalists, presented below in alphabetical order:

YPP 2025 jury

Gail Buckland is a museum curator, author and former distinguished professor at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science in New York City. She has also taught at Columbia College, Chicago; the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn and held the Noble Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Buckland has curated exhibitions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Brooklyn Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the New York Historical Society and the Royal Photographic Society, London, where she was Curator of Photography. Buckland has written or collaborated on over fifteen books. She lives in Brooklyn, New York and the Hudson Valley.

(Photo by Jill Furmanovsky)

Kristi Kongi is an Estonian artist whose practice explores the relationship between color, light, and space through both painting and large-scale installations. Known for transforming architectural spaces into immersive, emotionally charged environments, she draws on personal memory to construct vivid, abstract landscapes.

She currently serves as Head of the Painting Department and Associate Professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts in Tallinn. Her work has been widely exhibited both in Estonia and internationally.

(Photo by Hedi Jaansoo)

Vilmantas Marcinkevicius is a Lithuanian artist and founder of the Young Painter Prize. Marcinkevicius’s distinct painting style was formed at the Vilnius Academy of Art during the collapse of the Soviet Union. His paintings can be distinguished by their vivid and unexpected colors, figurative metaphors and simplistic depictions of nature. Although Marcinkevicius creates spontaneously, each painting he creates has a theme, often posing uncomfortable questions. The artist has had 30+ solo shows across Europe, including but not limited to Denmark, France, Sweden and the Faroe Islands.

Bill McAlister is a visionary cultural leader, community activist, and independent arts producer whose career has spanned decades of innovation in the arts, education, and social engagement.

He served as Director of Battersea Arts Centre and later the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, where he played a pivotal role in shaping contemporary cultural discourse in the UK and beyond. He went on to become Cultural Policy Director at the Soros Foundations and has served as a trustee and advisor to numerous international organizations.

Honored with the Order of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres and granted honorary citizenship of the Commonwealth of Maryland, Bill continues to influence cultural life as a Senior Advisor at Tonguesten and as an independent film producer.

Andris Vītoliņš is a Latvian painter, professor and Vice-Rector at the Art Academy of Latvia. Vītoliņš’s work focuses on industrial themes; machines, vehicles, mechanical parts, etc. He obtained a master’s degree in painting from the Art Academy of Latvia, a bachelors in visual communication and studied at the Faculty of Design for three years. Vītoliņš would be familiar to any artists involved with the art fair ArtVilnius, as he participated as both an artists and a chairman of the international jury for selecting the best participants.

YPP 2025 patrons

Ortiz family

Raila family

Rasa Juodviršienė

Bajorūnas/Sarnoff Foundation

YPP 2025 sponsors

YPP 2025 is co-financed by the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

YPP 2025 partners

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