Exhibition Kolarac,
Mr Vasilije Sujic
Searching for the new paths at a time when all paths seem to have been discovered is a great challenge for the contemporary artists. This challenge can be overcome only by the most talented among them, and one of them is certainly B.M. who understands that there is no progress in the art, only the motion in its various forms.
Bojana’s artistic development is logical, if brief. She started with the paintings imbued with a strong Art Informel charge and moved towards a world of signification with an open symbolic system. She has chosen the most difficult path, often inexplicable to an inept viewer who expects a painting to represent something (in the classical figurative sense). These paintings, however, convey a different messages, a different universe, a different laws which are to be revealed only gradually. And in order to read these pictures, one needs a different alphabet, an alphabet of pure visual expression in which pictorial values can prevail. This type of painting is committed to incessant exploration. It took a great deal of effort and self-sacrifice to move from opaque, almost black colors to the entirely bright, radiant pictures.
Bojana as an artist who thinks in the categories of Art Informel of the 1960s, spontaneously redefined by New Belgrade Informel. These categories may sometimes be pungent, the brush stroke rough, and yet this very same stroke can be gentle and ethereal without loosing anything of its pungency. Whether she constructs a painting layer by layer, or scratches her way violently down to the very canvass, her “act of violence” never loses its lyrical touch. And this dialogue between coarse and fine strokes serve the purpose of the revival and the perpetual creation of new rhythms which are to permeate the experience of the viewer.
Thus – one must emphasize this – Bojana possesses the sensitivity of a gifted artist which allows her to probe boldly into the realms of the purely visual and symbolic.
Cultural Center Bucharest,
Mr Corneliu Antim
Bojana Maksimovic surprised us with a distinctive type of sensitive communication and a lyric charge which her paintings impose upon the viewer. Her works confirm a path of a highly homogeneous stylistic synthesis, and a highly suggestive stylistic profile. Her first international exhibition points to the imperative of the emancipation of her individual artistic expression which at the same time means the liberation from the school and the rejection of the commercial painting.
Her meticulous visual construction is provoking, and her poetics of form, verges on metaphysics. Sublimated forms, outstanding chromatic discourse, refined complex tones and the poetic titles of her paintings (My Garden, Echo) draw the viewer into a world of abstraction. The complacency of colors, lucidity and dynamism of Bojana’s artistic instinct makes this exhibition a superb representative of European art from the Lower Danube region.
Cultural Center Belgrade,
Mrs Natalia Cerovic
TThe artistic expression of Bojana Maksimovic has developed within a school of fine arts which is characterized by its affinity for intimacy, refinement and poetic quality. She is primarily interested in form and its life in space. Tiny protuberances in the texture variously reflect external light making the effect of glimmering surfaces still more convincing. The internal illumination emanating from color values is used by the author as a means of controlling the cohesion of the local tone. By blending various forms of light and metaphorical content she creates conditions which enable her to formulate the solid and complex constructions of her language The visual text painted out in some of the works like “The Ballet-Dancer” or “Sopoćani”, achieves the pithiness of content found only in the most successful minimalist forms in our art. To be lavish in expression, yet nobly restrained, is an ideal attainable only by few. The already demonstrated qualities of Bojana Maksimovic herald an oeuvre in which the evident artistic potential is bound to find its full confirmation.
Exhibition Gallery Vladislav Marzik
The art of Bojana Maksimovic evades all conventionality. She establishes the great rapport with her own inner person creating an evocative, rather than reproductive image. She experiments with various non-painting materials, but in her pictures these materials acquire a novel painting value. She mixes paints and pigments with sand, saw-dust, shavings, crushed marble, and through the relationships between coarse and smooth, convex and concave, rusty and shiny she achieves a profusion of diverse pictorial values. Bojana works on her paintings slowly, and she works in layers of various structures and materials; together with color they produce a rich visual orchestration. From different materials she builds a new world which possesses its own signs, functioning on their own and living their own lives.
In all the paintings from her last series she introduces metal, turning it – as she does other materials – into an element of painting on an equal footing with other media. Thus, one finds on her paintings wires, armatures, metal shavings, keys, chains, battery cells and the like. Yet, these coarse materials notwithstanding, her pictures are imbued with poetic lyricism, as their very titles suggest. Even if this play with various materials offers a broad field for artistic impression, indicating possible influences of Art Informel, her works are filled with the symbolism and the metaphorical meanings, more suggestive of symbolist art.
