Born in Vilnius, Lithuania (1983), Alina Melnikova lives and works in Vilnius and Barcelona. She has exhibited her works widely in Europe -Austria, Spain, Germany, Poland and Finland- since graduating from the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2008.

Through different mediums such as drawing, installation, ceramics, performance and -especially- oil painting, Alina explores visual aspects of seduction through notions of sensuality, sexuality and erotism. In her newest works, A. Melnikova researches the relation between nature/naturality and artificiality and its sociocultural reflections. Artist’s focus opens up from gender identity to the categories of post-humanism and post-identity, transcending the limits of the anthropocentric perspective and testifying to a change in the taxonomic approach and the deconstruction of the hierarchic classification of life forms.

Though the artist refers to the insights of scientific research (Donna Haraway, Lynn Margulis), her creative approach is intuitive and leaves some space for indeterminacy, doubts, confusion, and paradoxes. Using different media and adding ecological and cultural dimensions to a culturally engaged look, the artist creates visually and semantically multi-layered artifacts.

In 2009, she won the Award for Young Painters in Lithuania; in 2013, she was invited to the international artist residency “La Cité Internationale des Arts” in Paris. In the same year, she was granted Artistic status by the Lithuanian Cultural Ministry.

Her work has been exhibited in art institutions of international importance like the KUMU Contemporary Art Center in Tallinn (Estonia) and the CAC of Vilnius (Lithuania). Alina’s work resides in contemporary art collections such as Dietrich Mateschitz (Red Bull Collection), Lewben Art Foundation and Modern Art Center in Vilnius. In 2022 her work was included into the book “Lithuanian women artists. Women Artists in the Visual Arts from the Beginning of the 20th Century to the Present Day’’ by A.Narušytė. She has an upcoming group showing MOCAK Contemporary art center of Krakow (Poland) in 2023.

Parallely, she is an associate member of La Escocesa – analogical art creation center in Barcelona, Spain and forms a part of the Artistic duo together with Italian artist Fabrizio Contarino where she explores collectively engaging creative processes which deal with visual memory related to pop culture.