Shattering Notions of Space: Dissecting the Unsettling Realities of Home

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Neda Nikolić | About the artist:

UNSETTLING THE HOME The focus of paintings contains a truthful post historical query. It is a span of created spatial evidence and a visually soulful journey.

Her works in lush painted acrylic, both on canvas and on wood, transfer an evolvement from a realm of dreamlike and recalled spatial enigma.

Such vitality is twofold: it brings a layered experience of a full blown and educated artist in the streaming of images and information made at the tempting start of the third decade of 21st century.

On the other side dwells a displacement of evolving insecurities. In the scope of composition, these artworks embrace the viewer into a density of reflected contrasts.

This method is correlated into objecthood that scatters the mechanic interfaces of childhood playgrounds seen in painter’s previous series, and a mere tropes of skilled challenges.

This is due to her background evolvement that has a prologue and examination of changing existential order as her works both in spatial installation, painterly and object gatherings.

These examinations of polygon and three dimensional illusions are made in an emphasis from screen-like games into a provoking, commonly recognizable habitats or even built as mere stereometric schemes.

Colorful and inviting order somehow becomes a direction interwoven in western European painting tradition of structural disposition as well as the illusions.

Such composition encompasses multiple entry points of scopic regime where the contained perspective makes a disposition that casts diverse analogies.

From her previous wide spatial range of painting on spreaded wall sheets and objects, eloquent works that emerged from her studio after 2020, mark a profound pictorial expression of existential shelter, both in memories and associative exposures. Inventory of paintings such as ‘Same as it ever was’, ‘Quiet’ or ‘The Ball’, hold a significant sensation of quietude and optical ambiguity.

This is not a mere depicted storage or an archiving of geometric solids and associative forms as Gestalt or gathered shapes, but the witnessing patterns of the overall experience of the whole. Each of these paintings makes a perceptual site as a scheme of environmental perception.

It is easy to recall the premise of metaphysical endeavour in arty, those synthetic networks of historical and everyday objects in the tempting consequences of a changed natural world, of crumbling economics, devious politics and adaptive personal emotions are at stake.

Mnemonic strength of imagined paradoxes of depicted vacant spaces is a disconcerting residue of physical, sensory and spiritual demarcations.

In medium of painted diversity of such geometric solid gatherings with vegetative and organic flora, there is a emotional fulfillment: elusive signs and imposing absence measure the realities of our anthropocene compression.

Nikola Suica, PhD Professor, University of Arts Belgrade Curator, Biennale Venice, Serbian Pavillion 2017 

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Images and text courtesy the artist.

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Images on view below:

Caption 1: Room 9 | 30x40cm | Mixed media on wood | 2023 

Caption 2: Room 11 | 24x30cm | Acrylic on wood | 2023