Turquoise Painting

Despite resting on classical painting postulates, the painting of Ivana Živić is an unusual multi-layered synthesis of guration and fantasy. Tackling contemporary times of pressure and uncertainty, Ivana unsel shly gives us works with accented light, unique time, composition and scenicality which celebrate colour in its full importance. This artist was challenged by nature and people in her early works, but women have become a leitmotif in the last ve years of her creation – she depicts swimmers set in unusual, imposing interiors, often devastated and full of water. The fascination with water in the opus of Ivana Živić can be seen in two ways – what is primary is a strong emotion which stems from real life situations and is transposed to facial expressions and the body language of the artist’s main protagonists. What the viewer experiences is a sense of freedom, ease, and being unconstrained, despite looking at untypical images, speci c to the imaginarium of this artist. The scenes and details found in Ivana Živić’s opus are a basis for a surreal story seeing that the artist takes the ordinary and transfers it to the extraordinary through numerous instances of nesse. The swimmers are separated from the background, gracefully cutting into the tissue of the painting, diving in, oating and moving, thus creating the illusion of water. The gures are lonely, stopped in these imaginary spaces, either in sumptuous backdrop of unusual buildings or in ruined spaces and stairways, thus existing while exploring their own inner world. The art of Ivana Živić offers the viewer both a sanctuary but also a pull towards freedom as, in her art, women are synonymous with freedom. Maja Živadinović