Rute Merk (born 1991 in Lithuania), now lives and works in Berlin. She received her BA in Painting from Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2013 and acquired her painting diploma from Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich, 2020.

Merk draws fuzzy lines among genders, anonymous identities, and also the integration of realistic fiction and virtual realities in the facture of her painting which reverberates in its aesthetics of late ’90s RPG video games. Staging her subject matters into the seemingly computer generated imagery and scenes, Merk takes a deep look into the distance between a person and the phantasmal of the given image, which simultaneously becomes a document and distortion arisen from the triumph of digital world and reformation of the individual. Unknown figures become animated through resemblance to specific personage in the state of virtual existence, a reincarnation of human spirits in the context of technological achievement. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas; Kunstverein München, Munich; Marburger Kunstverein, Marburg; RUPERT, Vilnius; and Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius. Recent solo exhibitions include: f(x), Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2022; Стрілецька, WT Foundation, Kyiv, 2021; SS20, Downs & Ross, New York, 2020; and Solitaire, Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai, 2020. – Gallery Vancancy