Available Works

Ivana Živić is certainly not an ordinary painter of realistic motifs, she is different from all the others, among the most original, because she does not use the usual solutions of the new realists. She doesn’t paint hyperrealistically, but has her own expression, she doesn’t explore the enlarged scene and human heads, conventionally speaking the now-favorite portraiture on a large format, which can also be understood as a landscape of the human body and figure. Instead, he composes complex wholes, oil paintings that are very demanding in solving the frog’s perspective, bodily shortening and distortion, optically determined by the refraction of the scene in the water. At first glance, her visual world is realistic in appearance, but conceptually, it is moved to completely unreal, unreal environments, the painting is drowned in an aquatic atmosphere and the bodies are submerged in a watery labyrinth.

Challenged, painters like her can oppose the frenzy of film and television kitsch, totalitarian advertisements, various series, hits and games. Her success is all the greater because she builds the picture with completely traditional elements – something similar could have been created in the Baroque or the nineteenth century. There is nothing of the current world in her powerfully expressed oils, yet each of them excites and provokes with an extremely modern sensibility. Rococo castles, luxurious chambers from the past, Orthodox churches and mosques, as Claude Debussy would say “sunken cathedrals”, are presented on those canvases, yet the artistic expression is contemporary without being reduced to a minimum. The observer is refreshed and pleasantly surprised after all the endless and tiresome visual shocks, wits and stresses, optimism is the greatest novelty.

Dejan Đorič, art critic

When I looked at the paintings for the first time, I had the impression, and it very often happens that even the paintings of the greatest painters in the world are better in photographs than live, but here, I have to admit, that these paintings I see, have that fantastic, one of my life’s motives, that actually water is found in real spaces, here it is executed, I would say, with a special technique and in a way painting that we are slowly losing, which is the painting of people who know how to paint. In this figuration, there is something that we inherit from our past, where in painting, as one of the most important, past activities, we still adhere to the principles that painting is painting, as with film, that it is audio-visual art. I think that this is pure artistry, which transposes to us the excitement that the author probably achieves while creating, and then this temperature transfers to us.

Emir Kusturica, film director

Ivana’s works are characterized by the exploration of interiors filled with water, painted with a characteristic mixture of figuration, fantasy and montage. The observer feels enveloped in these spaces inhabited by the solitary figure of a swimmer who explores the inner emotional world. Having reached a technically very high painting standard, Živić does not deal with unpleasant topics of the world around us, but resides in the world of feelings, presented through a series of highly aestheticized metaphorical spaces through which the swimmer’s body easily passes, flies and dives. The two basic building elements of the story – the swimmer and the rooms – are positioned as a natural response to an unnatural situation: the spaces seem stable and real, while the swimmer’s body appears as a blurred, unreal phenomenon, an astronaut cruising through some of her inner space.

Aleksandra Lazar, art theorist, curator Gallery Drina

The creative work of Ivana Živić begins with an apparent, observed scene and an isolated detail, and ends with a rich and surreal visual story. Scenographically interpreted as the backdrop of magnificent buildings, the walls between which we move become spaces of desire and contemplation, but also of the need for control and rationalization. By combining the three motifs with which she builds the space of the painting – water, a luxurious interior and a lonely figure, the artist leads the viewer with a sure hand into an artistic narrative that starts from visible reality. Using realism and ambiguity, Ivana Živić achieves an enchanted and poetic atmosphere of the painting, which the presence of water emphasizes with its multiple symbolic meanings. Unreal environments are also rich in symbols, while the clothed figure is in a thoughtful and associative relationship with the space through which he moves without stopping.

Zorica Atić, art historian

People have always sought freedom in religion, philosophy, culture and art. Everyone, in accordance with personal sensibility, strives for freedom from fear, freedom from suffering, pressure, other people’s opinions, imposed beliefs… Water evokes a feeling of lightness, levitation, flying and freedom, while on the other hand, spaces, even if they are luxurious, leave the impression of some anxiety, restraints, claustrophobia, imprisonment. The impression of a submerged space is suffocating, accelerates the desire to find a way out, intensifies the desire for freedom.

Ivana Živić, painter