BIO
I was born in Sarajevo, a beautiful town visibly rich with many different traditions. Mine was a happy childhood in what now seems a utopian Yugoslavia. Every summer I travelled around Europe with my parents, visiting major museums; these visits were important purpose of our trips. I walked through the museums with pencil and notebook, trying to capture my impressions and mark artists' names. I remember these as overwhelming experiences.
My early education, which was solid and traditional, offered no models that I was able to embrace, no imaginable framework for my identity; I knew very early that I needed to look beyond. The first artists that left deep impression on me were Kandinsky and Klee. At that time I studied physics at University of Sarajevo, a subject that taught me about abstraction, purity of ideas and concepts. I began drawing and painting regularly, trying to reproduce what I saw in the work of artists I liked.
In 1984/85 I studied in Copenhagen under Richard Kiaergaard, a distinguished Danish ceramicist. This was my first introduction to clay and to the art of vessel, hand-modeled and slip-cast with rigorous attention to form.
From 1985 to 1989 I attended School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston completing the studio program in painting.The Museum School was a vibrant environment where through regular critique sessions and lectures, I felt intensely immersed in the contemporary art scene.
After graduating I moved back to Europe and spent several years in France and Switzerland. Those were difficult years for me personally: the war was raging in Yugoslavia and my country was falling apart; but they were also a turning point in forming my work. Questions of my practice came into focus and I began to develop a vocabulary of forms and marks which I recognized as the language I was looking for.
My art practice evolves from a constant dialogue with the world that surrounds me. I change mediums and subjects but retain constancy in construction of object or composition. I paint or draw directly out of the material and keep the process open, employing and redefining the formalism through which my artwork emerges.
I have lived in New York since 1994, working in my studio and also, during the past ten years, in the ceramics studios at the Greenwich House.