KRUOPIS, Saulius

Saulius Kruopis (born February 19, 1960, in Šiauliai, Lithuania) is a prominent Lithuanian painter, photographer, cultural promoter, and master artist, trained between 1975 and 1980 at the Kaunas School of Art and subsequently between 1987 and 1993 at the Vilnius Academy of Arts (where he studied painting under the tutelage of renowned professors such as L. Tuleikis, V. Gečas, and A. Šaltenis), whose artistic trajectory falls within Lithuanian neo-figurative expressionism, lyrical plein-air landscape painting, having founded and led since 1995 the famous Nida International Painting Plein Air "Nidos Ekspresija" on the Curonian Spit, which revived the historical tradition of the 19th-century Nida artists' colony, thus distinguishing his style through a bold and saturated use of color, gestural impasto brushstrokes, and a mastery of natural light over seascapes, dunes, and traditional architecture, drawing stylistic influence from German Expressionism (the Die Brücke group), the 1930s Lithuanian expressionists of the "Ars" group, Fauvism, and Baltic Symbolist landscape art, with his work represented in major public collections and institutions such as the Lithuanian National Museum of Art in Vilnius, the M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art in Kaunas, the Šiauliai City Museum, the History Museum of Lithuania Minor in Klaipėda, the National Art Gallery of Lithuania, as well as in the collections of city halls, embassies, and cultural foundations across countries including Germany, Denmark, India, Armenia, Nepal, Georgia, and Poland.