Compostion 9 Drawing

Ivana is a Croatian artist from Makarska born in 1987. She graduated in 2011 from the Academy of Fine Arts (Bosnia and Herzegovina) with a Master´s degree in painting. She has held 3 solo exhibitions and been invited to take part in over 20 national and international exhibitions. In the competition held by the University of Mostar in 2008 she was awarded second prize in photography. Josip Karamatic describes her work as a vision of homeland landscapes, refined with a substantial dose of symbolization. Reductive figuration with its systematic accentuation of form, makes her canvases a form of personal re-examination of painting. On first impression, these paintings suggest an absence of the artist’s interest in any kind of moving outside of painting; a way of trying to find the meaning of life, the despair over the fate or an appropriate creative hyper production under powerful rush of inspiration. Author with her paintings, measure of the most romantic spices, adds just particles of mood of being what, with simulated narration, leaves all of the stories, her own before all, and then ours too, in the second plan. Free as that, already in the beginning she devotes herself to the painting alone. She freely plays with colour, tones, lines and textures, and as an author, with each canvas anew notes her reaches. On surfaces mostly dominate non-colours (black and white) with occasionally strong coloristic emphasis of forms, filled with colours, freely put in relation to them. Treatment of surface varies because author is consistent in her re-examination of different painting effects, from smooth passages to those treated in art brut manner. Visual expression of her paintings is boldly sublime and for surely programmatically poor. She freely tears macrostructure of painting and opens it to sequences of forms, whole or abrupt, and with strong, fluorescent pink accent realizes movement in doses on a two-dimensional surface of canvas. In that way dynamic and strongly accentuated space, on micro and macro level, courage reception of Ivana’s paintings, because as viewers, we can understand it as a call for our active participation in their interpretation. Homeland horizons, exposed or overshadowed, sombre or refined in lusty nocturnal darkness give Ivana’s paintings recognizable visual quality. Opus is deliberate, soft and intellectual. Determined and completed, Ivana´s paintings function as visual metaphors of our possibilities and accomplishes.