Ljiljana Mihaljevic – White, Gray, Black

art of impotence

Paintings – video installation – video performance

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Between times in New York, Florence and Zagreb, at her most recent exhibition in the Gallery MC of New York, entitled White, Gray, Black, subtitled Art of Impotence, Ljiljana Mihaljevic continues with her power of impotence series, marked by letter installations or paintings, by video installations and performances.

Art of Impotence by Ljiljana Mihaljevic is a rather voluptuous storehouse of the power and distinctiveness of this artist; of power that gives only candour with no calculation. This is an autobiography inscribed on the surface with the aspiration however that the convention of the word be laid by, that a space for point and stimulating ambivalences and meanings be opened up on the very surface.

This is the matter of a specialist in words, of great linguistic competences, which can justly boast of knowing the language. On the other hand, it is about simplicity, of modesty in icon and letter, and certainly of autobiographically ironic, witty and cultivated expressions. For all of this takes place in an area of impulses and feelings that is disciplined in a geometrical and structural, iconologically restrained but nevertheless suggestive range of experience.

Text, word, letter are formed, bent and modified without external propriety being touched on. They tell of their own impotence (the painting entitled Clueless) or some really moving content. This is neither depth nor metaphysics, rather a rippled and agitated surface full of the new admissions that only candour provides. This is the old age of the word, as well as its capacity to take on new contents. For by displacing words and letters, their sequence or run, we come to words that literally express what they say.

Redeeming word from entropy and habit, absorbed Wittgenstein-like by language, Ljiljana Mihaljevic, like the great philosopher, believes “that a carefully attention to the surface of the language can settle riddles, and that trouble comes when we attempt to penetrate below the surface.”

CURRICULUM VITAE (ongoing)

Education:

Academy of Fine Arts, Florence (painting)

Faculty of Philosophy, Zagreb (cultural anthropology)

Location:

New York, Zagreb, Florence, and spaces between

Orientation:

More inner directed (though only for the rhyme)