Paintings in collection

Ivana Živić’s painting practice focuses on the relationship between the body, space, and inner states of consciousness. Through figuration, she explores liminal zones in which the body exists between control and surrender, stability and loss of balance. Motifs of water, interiors, and ornament function as carriers of psychological, cultural, and emotional layers.
Her process is based on collaboration with live models in real conditions, most often underwater, in swimming pools and in the sea. These sessions are unstructured and rely on physical experience, breathing, and unpredictability, allowing the models to become active participants in the formation of the image. The artist begins with real architectural spaces that she photographs on site, then reconstructs and reshapes them into composite environments. From photographic material, scenes emerge that transcend documentary representation and become mental spaces.
This long-term body of work, developed over more than a decade and brought together under the title Rooms of Water, is realized through large-scale oil paintings. In these works, space does not function as a backdrop but as an active field of psychological, bodily, and perceptual experience.
Painting serves as a means of slowing down and transforming immediate experience into a visual language of prolonged presence. Ivana Živić’s works are positioned within contemporary figurative painting, yet outside narrative or illustrative logic, insisting on stillness, suspension, and openness of meaning.