Ivana Kličković

The focus of Ivana Kličković’s practice rests on the process of selection and “sampling” of culturally and chronologically distant visual patterns – such as Japanese woodblock prints, drawings of old theatrical scenery or digital images pulled from the Internet – which she recreates on canvas as simultaneously overlapping layers of reduced image fragments that form large-scale compositions, spatially flat and open to interpretation, both abstract and/or quasi-representational. Confirming atemporality as one of the main features of her painterly gesture, Kličković indirectly but accurately comments on the multidirectional, constant and often chaotic circulation of images in our everyday lives, in which everything has already been seen and exists intertwined, independently from isolated cultural patterns and social phenomena. By reacting to and participating in a global economy of images, in which dissemination of visual information is organised in such a way, Kličković takes over and examines the logic of overlapping, mixing, flexibility, conflict, and simultaneity of visual motifs and styles within her own painting structure. These paintings are not created with pretence to either semantic coherence or didactic intent. If a reference to history or genre of painting is to be used in relation to them, then the landscape, in its broadest sense, could serve as the methodological framework – a landscape that, in Kličković’s paintings, appears as a section of an infinite horizon from which the sequence of the visible is isolated by the eye. In this case, however, we are looking at imaginary landscapes that open up as vast spaces built on a network of fragments overlapping in a way that involves multiple views and that, in this sense, cannot be limited to what is comprehended exclusively by any single eye. (Text: Ana Bogdanovic)

Ivana Kličković was born and raised in former Yugoslavia. She graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she received MA in Painting. Between 2000 and 2010 she worked as research associate, assistant lecturer and a docent at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade. Since 2010 she has been based in Berlin, where she developed a multidisciplinary practice based around an idiosyncratic exploration of correspondences between painting, drawing and photography, and their relation to film and theatre design.

Kličković’s most recent solo exhibition, Paintings, was presented in 2020 at Gallery Gilla Lörcher Berlin. Previous solo exhibitions include ‘here… the moon’ at the Art Gallery, Cultural Center of Belgrade; the Faculty of Architecture; Belgrade Youth Centre; and Centre for Cultural Decontamination, all in Belgrade; and Gallery of Contemporary Art in Pančevo, Serbia. Her work was included in a number of significant group exhibitions in Serbia, including at the Yugoslav Biennial of Young Artists in 1998 and 2004; the 39th and the 42nd October Salon, in 1998 and 2001 respectively; the SKC Student Cultural Centre in Belgrade in 2007 and Abstract Landscape 2.0, at the Cultural Centre of Belgrade in 2022; as well as part of Arcadia Unbound at Funkhaus, Berlin in 2015.

In recent years Kličković designed costumes for theater and film. Most recently on productions with theatre directors Lily Sykes at Badisches Staatsteater Karlsruhe (2023) and Schauspiel Frankfurt (2022) and Sanja Mitrović at Schaubühne Berlin (2019) and KVS Brussels (2021). She has also been one of key creative collaborators for British artist Phil Collins on his projects This Unfortunate Thing Between Us (2011), my heart’s in my hand… (2013), Tomorrow Is Always Too Long (2014), Ceremony (2017), and Bring Down The Walls (2020).