Giedrė Montvila (Montvilienė)

(1941)

Biography

Montvila was born in Vilnius, Lithuania, where early aptitude for drawing was encouraged by her parents. With her family, she emigrated to the United States in 1949, settling in Queens, NY. Montvila began her art education at the High School of Music and Art, and at Queens College she developed her interest in life drawing. She continued her art studies at the Catan Rose Institute of Art and at The Art Students League, both in New York City. Throughout her schooling, Montvila pursued her primary concentration in drawing and painting the human figure. Over the years she has received portrait commissions from corporations and individuals.

Giedre Montvila has exhibited her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York and Connecticut, where she lives and works. Her paintings are in corporate, institutional and private collections.

Style

Giedre Montvila creates exquisitely rendered drawings in colored pencil using imagery culled from cosmetic and fashion advertising. These drawings of beautiful faces and hard bodies serve as a basis for tromp l’oiel paintings in oil on linen. She intends her work as an enquiry into the media’s power to shape our ideas of beauty and desire. At the Wooster Art Institute in Danbury, CT, Montvila received training in classical oil painting technique and developed an interest in the work of Ingres, Caravaggio, and Vermeer. She acknowledges the early influence of artists ranging from Magritte and Georgia O’Keefe to Robert Rauschenberg and Philip Pearlstein. A formative experience for Montvila was the six years she spent as a runway fashion model in New York, during the 1960’s. This work gave her an insight into how the media creates images for public consumption.

By the mid 1990’s Montvila had started to develop her ongoing series, a provocative critique of images of glamour and decadence.