Family Portrait

My works emphasise the materialistic nature of Humans, the problem of gathering and possesing, but mostly indicate the phenomenon of crisis of identity. While observing the material area which we created around us, I focus on space and items of emotional value, those which create a similar reminiscence within all of us.

The project "Family Album" consists of a photo album containing nearly 60 photographs in which I digitally intervened. These are mostly childhood images. I want to present a universal family album, the witness of passing, having and being. Holding a photo album in its original form, browsing photos in this tangible form, looking at them in amazement evokes the sentiment. This sentiment is equal to those one feel towards any item in one's possesion.

The Play

In my visions, the Human, children's corrupted figure, is always without form, with no identity, unmarked, undetermined, changeable, flexible, alienated, manipulated, secondary in relation to the items described literally... This is because we/humans are almost ideologicaly subordinated to material world, and dependent to adoption, ownership and belonging to substantive area. Anyway, deleting the personal specificities, preferably perfect subordination of the individual to hierarchy of educational authorities and sciences, is one of the supreme principles of our spiritual life. (oil and acrilyc, 140x180cm)

Artificial ID

This series of portraits indicates the phenomenon of identity crisis. It strikes on multiple levels, affects locally yet globally, both at the level of individual cognition and in the context of collective behavior. Although we intend to unify socio-cultural structure with all the different politicized approaches, we are losing connection with reality, forgetting that the problem of identity crisis begins within ourselves, in the individual. Acquiring self-knowledge and self-awareness are the key activities of modern man. People driven by inertia unconsciously scrape trough life. In order to liberate, man must shake off all the established routes, all preconcerted patterns and models. The trend of 'equalization', syndrome of identity crisis, denies gender specificities, personality and primary sociocultural characteristics. Although preliminary outlined, this process is only apparent and superficial, creating a dissension, instead of the neutral and persistent connections.


I chose to portray writers H.Hesse, F.Kafka and V.Woolf, with respect to the existentialist theories based on notions such as subjectivity, autonomy, and accountability, and the freewill of the individual emphasizing the individual characteristics. I inverted this situation and made them universal by eliminating their identity when covering their eyes - the mirror of one's soul. The triptich is painted combining acrilyc and oil colors with collaged paper details such as that symbolic cover (each painting 160x140cm).


So, as Terry Eagleton wrote in The Idea of Culture: “It is dangerous to argue that the idea of culture today is in crisis, because when was it not? Culture and the Crisis go together. Culture has traditionally been the way we could drown our miserable particularity in the more powerful and comprehensive media. Culture-as-art was important because it allocated the appropriate values in an acceptable form. Reading, watching or listening, we leave aside our empiric self, with all its social, sexual and ethnic content, so we ourselves become the universal subjects.”

Having and/or being

My original and primary intention is to display items from the wider environment that describe our consumerist nature and the nature of collecting, so called hamster syndrome, mainly through painting. With aspiration to stimulate and simulate critique of consumeristic society, I have visually shaped my own artistic expression with bonbon colors of pop artistic dialect.

I am not interested in objects which we approach with a predetermined sentiment, but only those which we possess, despite their function and purpose, or items only of aesthetic dominance and decoration. This is, in a way, a form of object fetishism.

While painting these objects (cars, household inventory, pets ...) I used photography in order to remain true to the nature of objects and literally described them, and yet again objectified these items into new meaning and value. In case when I transform those images into a new "artistic" meaning, they become objects of oriented, filtered observation, but even then they do not lose their fundamental context. I think that this is the result of our need to identify with the cultural context in which we use/possess the observed item. The reason of unconcious identification is the effect of our own needs and desires to possess.