Elena Gaputytė was born into a farming family in the village of Drąseikiai, in northern Lithuania, on 21 March 1927. In 1941, following the Soviet and Nazi invasions of her homeland, she left Lithuania, eventually settling in England. Gaputytė was a sculptor, installation artist, painter, and gallerist who established the Sail Loft Gallery in St Ives, Cornwall.
Sculptor, painter and gallerist, Elena Gaputytė was born on 21 March 1927 in the village of Drąseikiai, in northern Lithuania, into a farming family. Her early life was shaped by war and occupation: in 1941, following the Soviet and Nazi invasions of her homeland, she fled Lithuania, eventually resettling in England as a young refugee, having spent several formative years studying abroad. From 1946 to 1949 she trained at the School of Arts and Crafts in Freiburg, Germany, then immigrated to Canada, attending the school attached to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. She later completed her education at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts in Paris from 1953-56. In 1956 she moved permanently to the UK, settling in St Ives, Cornwall, where she founded the Sail Loft Gallery in 1960 and was a member of the local Penwith Society of Arts. She later taught at Digby Stuart College (originally founded as a teacher training college for women in south London) and the University of London between 1964 and 1977.
Gaputytė’s practice combined sculpture, installation, and elements of performance art, often engaging with political, memorial, and spiritual themes. Her works were typically site-specific, executed using natural materials, such as stone and soil, and frequently incorporating fire and sound. In addition to producing installations and land art, she created free-standing sculptures. Whether forming spiked, forest-like arrangements or meticulously structured wooden compositions, tangled with organic fibres, her installations recall both sacred altars and archaeological remains. Her drawings and paintings, similarly, convey a raw intensity through a highly expressive line. Rendered in charcoal or ink, her figures and portraits are shaped through layers of marks that build up volume. These lines, often frenzied and repeated, generate an atmosphere of psychological intensity, whether sketching a crouching nude or the expressive face of a woman. Even her landscapes appear charged with motion and feeling, their surfaces scoured by a restless hand. Across mediums, Gaputytė fused the material with the metaphysical, articulating absence, trauma, and quiet endurance through sparse forms and evocative textures. Among her best-known works is the multipart installation, Viešpaties malda (The Lord’s Prayer), first created on the coasts of the Greek islands, Tyros and Paros, in 1978 and later shown in Berlin (1983) and London (1984). Many of her installations are testament to historic trauma, often invoking loss and renewal through the use of ritual and elemental materials. Other significant projects include the cycles Mano vaikystės kalendorius (My Childhood Calendar, 1975), Taikos Šviesos (Peace Lights, 1981, 1983), Tylus liudijimas (Silent Witness, 1984), and Pranašystė. Po 50 metų (Prophecy. After 50 Years, 1989). Music, often used as a live or recorded accompaniment, added a further immersive dimension to these temporal works.
Gaputytė exhibited widely across the UK. Early solo exhibitions included Drawings by Elena Gaputytė at the Sail Loft Gallery, St Ives (1961), and Elena Gaputytė: Sculpture and Drawings at the Marjorie Parr Gallery in London (1973). In the 1960s and 70s, she often collaborated with the Polish-born painter, André Dzierzynski, with whom she held two-person exhibitions at the Centre Charles Péguy (1963), Upper Grosvenor Galleries (1965), and Ellingham Mill (1971). In 1981 she showed with Geoffrey Sheard at the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria. Later exhibitions included Prophecy and Vision at the Camden Arts Centre (1983), the same year her works at the Orchard Gallery were critically reviewed: ‘Sometimes the simple action of lighting a candle in a church can be a calming, uplifting experience. The works called “Peace Lamps” by Elena Gaputyte is symbolic in this way. In an accompanying statement she refers to lights as symbols of hope and, in a special way here, it is a symbol of hope for peace in particular reference to the anniversary of Hiroshima, symbolised by the square slabs.’ (Derry Journal, 1983, p. 6). Other shows included a solo exhibition at Albion Studios (1985) and a group show, Artists with a Camera (Riverside Artists Group, London, 1990). In 1988, she participated in Gathering Rites' a sculptural exploration by eight artists at the Pitt Rivers Museum as part of Oxford Art Week and, the following year, she presented an installation at the Richard Demarco Gallery in Edinburgh, as part of the Edinburgh Festival, entitled Prophecy Made on the 3rd of September 1939.
In her final years, Gaputytė focused on a deeply personal and politically resonant project: the publication of Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea, a memoir by fellow Lithuanian exile and Gulag survivor, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė. Gaputytė discovered the harrowing manuscript by chance and resolved to publish it in a bilingual edition, illustrated with her own artworks, as a memorial to the victims of Soviet deportations. This book was intended to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the June 1941 mass deportations from Lithuania to Siberia. Elena Gaputytė died in London, England on 4 October 1991 with her ashes later interred in Lithuania beside her mother. Her work is not represented in UK public collections.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Elena Gaputyte ]
Publications related to [Elena Gaputyte ] in the Ben Uri Library