The Baltic Region’s Leading Competition for Emerging Painters

For more than 18 years, Young Painter Prize (YPP) has been discovering and championing the next generation of painters in the Baltic region.

As the oldest and most recognized competition for emerging painters in the Baltics, YPP brings together outstanding young artists from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and, since 2022, Ukraine. More than a competition, YPP is a platform for visibility, professional growth, and international connections, helping artists take their work beyond the studio and into the wider contemporary art world.

Each year, artists aged 18–33 submit their work to an international jury of artists, curators, collectors, and art professionals. The selected finalists become part of a growing community of artists whose careers continue to evolve long after the competition ends.

Talent Matters More Than Credentials

At YPP, we are interested in exceptional painters, not CVs.

No art degree is required. No prestigious academy is required. We believe great artists can come from anywhere. What matters is the quality, originality, and authenticity of the work.

Whether you are studying at an art academy, building your practice independently, or developing your work outside traditional institutions, we encourage you to apply.

Why Apply?

Over the past 18 years, YPP has become a launchpad for many artists who have gone on to build successful international careers. Among its most notable alumni are Andrius Zakarauskas, Kristina Ališauskaitė, Adomas Danusevičius, Jonas Jurcikas, Sandra Strėle, Agata Orłowska, and Linas Kaziulionis.

YPP offers more than an exhibition. It provides visibility, professional connections, international exposure, and access to a growing network of artists, curators, collectors, galleries, and cultural institutions.

Follow YPP 2026

Whether you’re an artist looking for your next opportunity, a curator searching for new talent, a collector, or simply passionate about contemporary painting, we invite you to follow YPP 2026 and discover the next generation of Baltic artists.

The 18th Young Painter Prize begins!

Applications for the 18th edition of Young Painter Prize are now closed.

This year, YPP once again invites the most talented emerging painters from Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Ukraine to share their work with an international audience and compete for a place in one of the Baltic region’s most respected contemporary art platforms.

Twenty-five finalists will be selected by an international jury and invited to participate in the YPP 2026 exhibition programme.

Exhibition Programme
Opening Exhibition
Tallinn Art Hall in Lasnamäe

Dates
11–27 September 2026

Location
Jaan Koorti 24
Tallinn, Estonia

Exhibition Tour
Art Academy of Latvia Gallery, Riga
21 October – 21 November 2026
Klaipėda Culture Communication Centre (KKKC), Lithuania
4 December 2026 – 4 January 2027

Alongside the exhibitions, YPP will continue to create opportunities for artists through professional networking, artist talks, public events, curator-led tours, and international visibility.

International Jury
Ásta Fanney Sigurðardóttir brings a different kind of electricity into the jury. An Icelandic visual artist, performer, musician and poet, she moves between language and silence, performance and poetry, ritual and installation. Her works often exist in the space where voice, object, myth and presence meet, where meaning is not simply explained, but transmitted.

Heske ten Cate is Curator of Contemporary Art at the Amsterdam Museum, a position she has held since 2024. Previously, she served as Artistic Director of Nest in The Hague, a contemporary art space known for experimental exhibitions and its engagement with urgent social and political questions. She has also worked as Editor-in-Chief of the art magazine Mister Motley and contributes as an editor and author to collaborative publications.

Paul Smulders knows painting from the inside of the process. A Dutch painter based in Amsterdam, his work moves between abstraction and figuration, between image and matter, structure and accident, nature and transformation.

Rūta Frankė brings the kind of perspective that understands both artists and the systems around them. As Deputy Director of Casino Luxembourg – Forum d’art contemporain, and formerly Director of the Modern Art Center in Vilnius (MO Museum), she has worked closely with contemporary art from the institutional, curatorial and strategic sides.

Vilmantas Marcinkevičius is not only a member of the YPP jury. He is the person who started the whole thing.
A Lithuanian painter known for expressive intensity, bold colour and emotional force, he initiated Young Painter Prize in 2009 with a very clear belief: young painters need to be seen earlier, not after the world has already made up its mind about them.

Special juror for the DEMUS ART Fund Prize Selection:

Mindaugas Vanagas — entrepreneur, art collector, and founder of Vanagas Group, which includes DEMUS Asset Management, CITUS, Oxygen, and other companies.
Known for developing innovative, community-focused real estate projects, Mindaugas actively supports the integration of art and culture into urban life. His growing collection brings together contemporary Lithuanian and international artists and reflects his belief in the power of creativity to shape more vibrant, thoughtful, and engaging cities.

Awards & Opportunities

DEMUS ART FUND PRIZE
The DEMUS ART Fund Prize “The Most Promising Artist” is awarded to a YPP finalist whose artistic practice demonstrates exceptional potential for future development. The prize includes a €3,000 monetary award and a one-year mentorship programme with DEMUS ART Fund, offering the selected artist long-term professional support, guidance, and opportunities for further artistic growth.
The award reflects DEMUS ART Fund’s commitment to supporting emerging talent and creating meaningful opportunities for young artists to strengthen their practice, expand their professional networks, and take the next steps in their careers.

LUMINOR PRIZE FOR YOUTH EMPOWERMENT
The Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment is awarded through Luminor Private Banking’s “Art to Grow Value” initiative. Valued at €3,000, the prize is decided through a voting process involving Luminor Bank clients, who select the winning work from among the YPP finalists chosen by the international jury.
The winning work is displayed in the Luminor VIP lobby for 12 months and later auctioned, with proceeds directed to social initiatives. This prize connects young artists with a wider audience and links art, visibility and social purpose.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS
The YPP 2026 jury will also award Honourable Mentions to selected finalists. These distinctions are given to artists whose works stand out for their artistic quality, strong visual language, conceptual clarity or particular relevance within the exhibition. Honourable Mentions allow the jury to recognise important works beyond the main prize and to draw attention to artists whose practices deserve further visibility.

Applications Closed
Applications for Young Painter Prize 2026 are now closed.
Applicants must:

  • Be between 18 and 33 years old.
  • Work primarily in painting.
  • Be citizens of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, or Ukraine, regardless of where they currently live; or be permanent residents of Lithuania, Latvia, or Estonia.

Application deadline: 7 July 2026
Finalists announcement: 3 August 2026

Questions? Contact us at

2026 Winners

Congratulations to this year’s Young Painter Prize winner, Andris Kaļiņins, and to the 2026 Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment recipient, Natallia Brichuk and 2026 DEMUS Art Fund recipient, Aurelija Zaburaitė. Honourable mentions were also awarded this year to Armine Hayk, Vladyslav Riaboshtan and Kirke Kits.

Young Painter Prize 2026 winner

Young Painter Prize 2026 winner

Andris Kaļiņins (LV)
Prussian Blue No. 19
170 × 140 cm / oil on linen / 2026

PrussianBlueNo.19 is structured according to the graphic logic of a traditional artists’ paint sample. Its proportions, white border, colour name and technical symbols frame the painting as an enlarged colour chart. Yet the central field does not present a uniform swatch. Through shifts in the density, transparency and darkness of a single blue oil paint, it produces a still-life image within the very material it displays.
Prussian Blue was accidentally discovered in Berlin around 1706 during an attempt to produce a red dye. Its discovery coincided with the early years of the Kingdom of Prussia, and its subsequent use in dyeing dark-blue Prussian military uniforms bound the pigment to a distinct military visual culture. The painting considers how a pigment can acquire political charge through its name, history of use and visual circulation. The battle motif extends this question towards a political order in which military power shapes culture,representation and everyday forms of visibility. The work develops this historical charge through the motif of a studio still life. A projected battle scene illuminates a classical plaster vase, its supporting plinth and the background wall. The projection determines the composition’s relations of light and dark. Across the curved surface of the vase and the creased planes of the plinth and background wall, fragments of soldiers, weapons and movement disperse into an unstable decorative pattern. A battle scene becomes ornament, while a classical form is illuminated by military imagery. Within this logic,the vase and projection are not independent subjects. They are motifs generated by the pigment and its name. Prussian Blue determines the historical field of research, the graphic format, the image source and the painting process. The image is permitted to emerge only through the tonal possibilities of the paint, from luminous transparent blue to dense, almost black passages. The painting does not resolve into a fully mimetic image: the battle remains intermittently legible, repeatedly submerged in the material presence of the paint.
By approaching militarised imperial power through Prussia, the work addresses a contemporary fear of Russian imperial aggression. Here, Prussia functions as a historical metaphor for contemporary Russia. Its military and cultural legacy becomes a lens through which a present threat can be considered.

2026 Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment winner

2026 Luminor Prize for Youth Empowerment winner

Natallia Brichuk (UR)
GOAT
140x180cm / acrylic, spray on canvas (from the painting series “bird”)

This artwork marks a definitive shift away from structural restraint and rigid linework, embracing an intuitive exploration of color fields and fluid space. Built on a monumental scale, the painting balances vast areas of vibrant yellow and soft pink tones against a dense, dark upper register. The composition is driven by spontaneous movement and gestural freedom, allowing layers of acrylic and raw spray paint to bleed, run, and dissolve into one another. This technique captures the fragile, shifting nature of an environment in flux, where solid boundaries vanish in favor of emotional atmosphere. At the core of the piece lies a large, abstracted presence that dominates the canvas – a recurring symbol of continuity and self-preservation amidst surround chaos. The figure seems to dissolve into its immediate surroundings, yet its heavy, grounded placement serves as a quiet anchor of stability. Grids and lattice-like structures appear along the sides, hinting at fragmented boundaries or protective barriers that are slowly breaking down under the weight of external pressures.
Incidental elements, such as the gestural, spray-painted floral shapes in the foreground, contrast sharply with the brooding weight of the background. These naive, swift markers bring a raw vitality and lightness to the scene, serving as small acts of endurance. By blending abstraction with loose figuration, the painting does not document a specific narrative but evokes a visceral state of memory – capturing the vulnerability, resilience, and quiet hope found when navigating a deeply unstable world.

2026 DEMUS Art Fund winner

2026 DEMUS Art Fund winner

Aurelija Zaburaitė (LT)
“Rows” („Eilutės“)
2025 / Pattern paper, ink, pencil on canvas / 80 cm x 60 cm

Rows are formed by carefully weaving a piece of clothing, the text being read or written is constantly divided into lines. Such a small unit of matter is equivalent to the very smallest thoughts that arise when the eye blinks involuntarily. Tiny movements, rhythmic pulse beats, remind us of the body’s order, so self-evident that it becomes unnoticeable. A mathematical row is a phenomenon consisting of an infinite sequence; its sum can almost never be calculated precisely. The rows stretch across the canvas, extending beyond its surface; the shape of the patterned fabric, wrinkled by warm human hands, cannot be contained within the frame. We calculate so that we may know how to manage and adapt a specific thing properly, whilst everything else remains beyond our control and continues of its own accord.

Young Painter Prize 2026 Honourable mentions

Young Painter Prize 2026 Honourable mention

Armine Hayk (LT/ARM)
Kieno duona/Whose Bread
180x430cm / oil on canvas / 2026

Kieno duona (Whose Bread) is the most recent work in a cycle I have been developing for three years, drawn from images observed in everyday domestic life. I am interested in objects that are constantly around us and, for that very reason, become almost invisible. In them, I recognise connections between warmth, energy, the earth’s resources, and our dependence on the systems that sustain daily life. Bread is not depicted directly in this piece – it remains an allusion, a question: what do we feed on – food, but also information, belief, attention – and by whose resources, labour, and time do we live?
In my surroundings I see the same objects again and again. The longer I look at them, the less self-evident they become. The flame of a gas stove begins to resemble teeth, a jaw, the depth of an open mouth. A grain, magnified and frozen in motion, starts to look like a living organism. To me, these resemblances are not invented metaphors. They arise from the form itself, from the scale, and from the duration of looking. The work consists of two images, horizontal in format, their combined length exceeding four metres. Juxtaposed, they form a single visual syntax: flame and grain, interior and exterior, warmth and cold meet in such a way that each image is read through the other. Neither is fully complete on its own – only when placed side by side do they alter each other’s meaning and force the gaze to move back and forth.
I am not certain whether the resemblance between the flame and the jaw, between the grain and a living organism, lies in the things themselves or emerges from looking for too long. But for me, this is precisely the place of painting: not to explain or to prove, but to hold the image in a state where one thing is still itself, yet already beginning to become something else. The work is painted in oils, in many thin layers. The slow drying of oil paint here is not merely a technical property – through it, I try to hold onto the same duration of looking from which the very observation of these images arose.
The title Kieno duona points to the Lithuanian proverb kieno duona, to ir giesmė – “whose bread one eats, his song one sings” – the debt owed to whoever feeds, warms, and sustains us. In this piece, only the conditions of bread are visible: the fire that bakes it, and the grain that grows, unaware of the fire still waiting for it. Between them remains the question of whose land, whose labour, whose energy we consume without noticing, each time we simply eat.

Young Painter Prize 2026 Honourable mention

Vladyslav Riaboshtan (UR)
The Tunnel
153 x 210 cm

In my recent work, I work with themes of war, seeking refuge, things that changed people’s perceptions after the war. I would like to show how this experience has changed the direction of my art. Before the war, I painted the subway as a mysterious place – a transport for people in big cities and a setting for a criminal underworld. For example, tunnels those lead somewhere, with a lot of intersections and technical zones, thinking about what they are made for. However, they all have a certain reason for their existence, their function, their purpose.
A person appears, not only as a user of the infrastructure, but as a subject riddled with choices. In addition to moving along set routes, there is a need for orientation and search. Each of the paths leads to a new perspective, into the depths of a space, which cannot be seen in advance. It is difficult to know which path will be more or less successful, as well as to decide whether to stay in place at all. In many places, space and form are deformed. Sometimes there is only a single corridor – with light at the end of the tunnel or, conversely, with darkness. Our current reality today only pushes us to think about the underworld and the continuation of existence underground. These thoughts are difficult to ignore; they are at the same time thoughts about death and the end, as well as about life – but in a different reality and under different conditions. One tries to adapt to new challenges and new choices in this perspective, the conditions for which are constantly changing.

Young Painter Prize 2026 Honourable mention

Kirke Kits (ES)
Docility
190 x 290 cm / oil and pastel on canvas

A choice of docility is inherent to the becoming of this painting. Docility here marks the concept of listening closely, so that one could be a better instrument for what needs to be expressed. Playing with this idea, I was impelled to use painting not any more as a means of attempting to describe myself but rather as a distanced, altar-like devotional object. The meeting point with the canvas shifted from self-challenging straight-forwardness to almost an act of service. Abandoning the execution of any fixed and predetermined visual offered me a new perception of myself as an artist, that of a tool needed by the painting.
The painting was done without any preparatory sketches, as the preceding works (a series of small paintings called “Heeding”) served rather as a mental preparation and practice on the idea of docility. The painted surface consists of multiple thin layers of oil paint which gains its subtleties from use of oil pastel that has partly been blended in, partly left visible as graphic lines. Abstraction is my preferred way of making visuals and serves to remove an imposed narrative. Any shape bearing a resemblance to lungs, a headdress or deer’s tracks therefore stems from the abstraction itself.

2026 Finalists

We are excited to share that this year’s Young Painter Prize received an impressive 117 submissions!

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

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