Artist statement
I am a figurative artist based in Belgrade, working across painting and drawing. My main technique is alcohol ink with oil on plastic, and I also use mixed media on canvas and paper.
My process is based on controlled accidents – dissolving and splitting material into its basic particles. I like to work this way because sharing responsibility with the medium helps the emotion and the material come into alignment and act together.
I often work with classical subjects such as portraiture, the nude, and the figure in landscape. These subjects connect personal experience with the history of art, carrying emotional and cultural memory from one time into another. This relates to Aby Warburg’s idea of the memory of images – the way emotions and images survive and reappear in different forms across time.
I think of this as continuity, and it is always a question of context. Having a background in architecture and urban planning, I never perceive an object separately from its environment. This way of thinking remains central to my practice: I begin with personal experience but see it as part of a broader historical, cultural and social context.
My experimental research with form focuses on how painting can continue to develop through the plasticity of its surface: how it can bend, fold and shift out of its fixed relation to the wall, becoming a spatial structure while remaining a painting. I want the viewer and the surrounding space to become more involved in how the narrative is read.
I make art mainly in three interconnected fields: inner mythology; portraiture as a way of encountering the world; and body presence. Body presence is a space for observation in my practice: how a body occupies and interacts with its surroundings, how it changes depending on the way it is seen. I approach inner mythology as a place where reality becomes experience, building a personal visual language from lived experience, historical references, myths and quotations from art. For me, portraiture is an optic through which I can approach any subject – a person, a tree or an object – challenging an anthropocentric distinction between human and non-human subjects. What defines portraiture for me is the intimacy of this encounter – a form of sustained attention that creates a particular closeness between the artist and the subject.