Between the 10th of December 2022 and the 12th of February 2023, the gallery Morren Galleries will present a new selection of paintings and sculptures by the Yugoslavian artist Maya Kulenovic.
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Maya Kulenovic was born in Yugoslavia; she has the nationality of Canadian and she studied art in London. Her paintings have been exhibited in over thirty solo exhibitions and many more group shows and art fairs in Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, the UK, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey. Part of many collections in different locations, the artist's workhorse are paintings and sculptures.
Whether with portraits, which she terms “faces”, architecture, referred to as “build” works, landscapes or still life images, Kulenovic’s focus is to capture an ambience or psychological state. She deliberately explores ambiguity, and in her approach to the painted surface, she works in glazed layers as well as destructive techniques to create images evoking a particular timeless context that invites the viewer to linger, thus investing him in the artist’s world. In her words, “the atmosphere of the painting arises from the relationships between the defining and destroying elements.” Despite the removal of particular narrative references to place, time, or human drama, it is not unusual for viewers to make strong personal identifications with her compositions. Maya Kulenovic’s works remind us of the historical without depicting it. Instead, her imagery has a compelling evocative power, both fascinating and challenging, that reaches viewers emotionally and viscerally. In her paintings, there is a dialogue between memory and culture, and a subliminal mechanism driven by the seemingly familiar and representative, in contrast with the uncanny. This process can be understood as reflecting a distillation of art history into contemporary forms that raise questions about our world of images, their doubles, and the future; about how we recognize the language of art historical imagery in a world where almost all imagery now comes to us in a secondary, usually virtual form, and where we should place ourselves amidst this duel for pre-eminence.
A book on Kulenovic’s paintings with an introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith was published by d’jonge Hond in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 2008. Kulenovic’s latest monograph, Fugue, including an essay by Mark Kingwell, was published in Toronto, Canada in 2017.
Check out all of her artworks on Kooness!
Cover image: Maya Kulenovic, Interlude no. 8, 2022. Courtesy of Morren Galleries
Written by Morren Galleries
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