Description

Jelena Bulajić was born in Vrbas in Serbia in 1990. After a BA at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad, she completed her MA at the City & Guilds of the London Art School in London. Bulajić was awarded by the City & Guilds of London Art School, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant and received Gam MA Fine Art Price. Currently she lives and works in Belgrade. She had solo exhibitions in the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina in Novi Sad (Serbia) in 2019 and at Gallery Carlier Gebauer Berlin’s space in 2020. Her black and white works explore the tactility of things’ surface such as the foamy clouds, the fur of a sheep or the aged skin of an old woman. This extreme fixation to recreate these textures on canvas required Bulajić to develop her own technique and to use marble dust, ground granite, limestone and kaolin. The infinite layers built on top of each other lead to months of work to finish an art piece. While at a first glance they look hyperrealist, the real interest of the artist is the passage of time. She presents it by maximizing images like an unfamiliar face or a sheep from a Spanish old master painting, or clouds on the sky which apparently are not connected in any ways. What groups them together, though, is that they are all subject to the passing of time, an intangible reality which has been the initiator of so many philosophical ideas for millenniums. Technically the artist uses photographs as a starting point and that step is an important organic part of the making process.