The artist’s fascination lies in the complex intersections of memory, history, and the human body. Elada 2025, a series developed during their master’s in painting, revisits the underground bodybuilding culture of Šiauliai—a phenomenon that thrived in secrecy during Soviet times, when the practice was prohibited. This hidden subculture becomes both a personal and cultural lens through which the artist explores themes of discipline, resilience, and transformation. Deeply informed by the artist’s relationship with their father, a figure tied to this world, the work merges inherited memories with lived experience. The result is an authentic reimagining of Elada, the legendary gym that operated from 1970 until its recent closure, preserving the atmosphere of an era now lost. The artist does not simply depict these spaces but reconstructs their uncanny intensity—the smells, textures, and tensions that defined them. The body, central to both art and bodybuilding, is approached here through expanded materiality. Moving beyond painting, the artist incorporates tactile elements such as women’s stockings, whose taut surfaces recall polished muscle while invoking femininity, fetish, violence, and fragility. This material language heightens the dualities at the heart of the work: force and delicacy, rage and beauty, masculinity and softness. Through this series, the artist invites viewers into a charged environment where personal history meets cultural memory, and where the body becomes a site of struggle, vulnerability, and reinvention.