Elena Uljancic

Painter, ceramics artist, lover of all things beautiful. I am a formally trained historian, and a museum CEO. As an artist I have been taught by many great masters of the trade. My teachers, among others, were and are such artists as Cristina Cordova, Efraim Rodriguez, Martin Lagares, and Andrew Joseph Keith.
Figurative art has always been my favorite genre, first in its realist form, where from I took it farther towards more abstract style.
ll my sculptures represent different elements of my inner world. Some are enjoyable and pleasant to look at even at the first sight, others are more complex and darker.
I hope you too might recognize some of those as your own perhaps.

Some time ago I got the opportunity to start working with ceramics. It’s been my first experience with both the material and the technique. What started as a hobby, as something playful, quickly grew into a strong need. The more I worked, it began to almost border with a kind of “obsession”. Starting from the simplest glazed forms, I soon began to create small sculptures with human faces and expressions, and after them busts.
Honestly, I don’t know who these characters are. Perhaps some kind of secret population, a secret world I do not want to go into too deeply, yet at the same time they are the inspiration that pushes me forward. Those figures are just looking for a way out, out of nothingness into the world - through my hands. As I make the sculptures and finish them, I always get a slight feeling that by naming them, making them characters, that is, I am somehow interfering where I shouldn’t and don’t need to. I simply "help" them to come out. And then of course, as is the case with many artists, I have to let them go and give them a chance to find new homes.