Press


Maja Maljević studio
Maja Maljević's Joburg studio is a riot of abstract colour | Photography © Pieter Vosloo
Maja Maljević’s Joburg studio is an artistic space filled with a riot of colour, creative spirit and endless energy. In this exclusive online extension to our current issue’s DECO Profiles feature, discover unseen pictures and details of this artist in residence.
After graduating in Belgrade in 1999, Serbian-born Maja moved to South Africa in 2000 and has been based in Joburg ever since. Loving the fact that her studio is part of her house here and that she can paint at any time without having to ‘go to work’, Maja credits her creative energy to the modest size of her working space. DECO sat down with Maja to poke around her funky studio and find out what makes her tick…
Describe your artistic concept in a nutshell…
I am interested in expressing a visual language made up of abstract elements and principles that converse with each other but do not construct a narrative through symbolism or analogy. It is a language of primary, bold, colourful, layered and dense imageries assembled on the canvas without prior negotiation. The composition evolves as each part is painted. The painting becomes itself.
Who is your favourite artist?
Just one artist? Under duress I’d pick Cy Twombly. But also Tal R, Jonathan Meese, Julie Mehretu and and and…
Maja Maljević studio
Maja’s paintbrushes cover every surface / Her trusty companion by her side | Image © Pieter Vosloo
What role does art play in your creative space?
Art is a necessary ingredient in the making of art. The more you surround yourself with it and creative or stimulating work, the more you are inspired to produce. This applies to the actual studio space itself. The more I produce in my studio, the more I am motivated to work and the more likely I am to generate new ideas.
The more you surround yourself with art and creative or stimulating work, the more you are inspired to produce.
What three words you would use to describe your workshop / studio space?
TooSmall (that’s one word), MessyButOrganised (another word, and I know when my husband has ‘borrowed’ something) and Mine
How does your working space inform or inspire your designs?
My studio is small and claustrophobic. I have the sensation of being immersed in the world of my paintings when working on a project and the busyness of the studio is energetic. It invigorates me and makes me more prolific.
Maja Maljević studio
Paint-splattered furniture adds to the creative history of Maja’s space / Her colourful artworks adorn every wall | Image © Pieter Vosloo
What are you creating in your workshop right now?
I am exercising my fascination with repetition and the patterning of elementary shapes and forms – and my process of layered addition and subtraction – in order to construct increasingly complex optical sensations.
What would be your dream commission?
I typically don’t take on commissions but I would like to be involved in public art; so maybe a commission for a mural. But on a grandiose scale, downtown in a big city like Johannesburg, and with creative carte blanche. No interference from commissioners.
Does your studio/workshop space reflect your personality – if so, how?
It’s my studio so it probably does, but you would have to ask a psychoanalyst for an interpretation.
Maja Maljević studio
Lego characters add personality and a cheerful spirit to Maja’s artistic space | Image © Pieter Vosloo
Do you have any lucky items / rituals within your space that help you work?
I don’t believe in luck, ritual or whatever – but I habitually listen to audio books while working.
What is your favourite thing about your studio & what would you most like to change?
I love the fact that my studio is part of my house and that I can paint at any time and without having to “go to work”. But I would l love to produce work that is bigger than the space allows.
What is your top design trend or idea at the moment?
I don’t follow trends but I talk to local designers, artists and interesting people, both here and in Belgrade, so I keep abreast of what is happening and then I decide what I like or what I don’t.
Maja Maljević ELLE Decoration studio
Maja often prefers to sketch on the floor in her Joburg studio | Image © Pieter Vosloo
What one piece of advice would you offer home owners to make their own space more artistic?
Be curious and enjoy beautiful things and ideas. Collect fashion, art, design, furniture, movies, books, toys, kitchen gadgets, whatever inspires you. When you are interested in looking at the world, your space will reflect your interests.
When you are interested in looking at the world, your space will reflect your interests.
What is the biggest challenge for SA artists and designers?
Politics, academia and galleries who won’t appreciate a work of art without reference to a political position and / or a scholarly piece of poppycock printed alongside the piece or in the catalogue.
What is our greatest asset as artists/designers working in SA?
The confidence to be open-minded and expressive in a screwed up world.
Maja Maljević ELLE Decoration studio
Maja Maljević’s studio is a riot of abstract colour | Image © Pieter Vosloo
Maja Maljević ELLE Decoration sketch
Maja’s colourful sketches inspire her creative space | Image © Pieter Vosloo
Maja Maljević ELLE Decoration studio
Pencil pots and old tin cans overflow with colours | Image © Pieter Vosloo

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Tuesday, 24 June 2014

ARTS AND CULTURE
07JUN

COLUMN: THE YOUNG BEATS AND "HORROR VACUI"

Column: The young Beats and  Column: The young Beats and  Column: The young Beats and
FIRST APPEARED
Thursday, 05 June 2014
Business Day

Daniel Radcliffe and his agents have been hard at work breaking the primary association of the actor with the Harry Potter franchise: in recent years he has been cast in classic plays on the West End, stage musicals on Broadway, horror and spy films in Hollywood. But there are times when, unexpectedly, his protracted portrayal of the boy-wizard helps rather than hinders a new role.
Young Potter escapes a troubled family life and is ushered into a world of magic and adventure – which, he soon learns, is also dark and threatening. In Kill Your Darlings, which opens in South African cinemas this week, Radcliffe again dons the horn-rimmed spectacles and awkward demeanor of a character who is discovering an enchanted, exciting, violent place. 
It’s not Hogwarts, but Columbia University in 1944. Aspiring poet and shy kid Allen Ginsberg meets Lucien Carr, the “angel boy demon genius” whose recklessness, charisma and charm make him the centre of a self-designated “Libertine Circle” that also includes Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. This is the crucible of what will become known as Beat literature, perhaps the most important cultural movement of the post-War period.
Invigorated by an urgent but inchoate vision, the hedonist-bohemians face ancient questions: What to write? How to write? Their university professors tell them to follow the canon of Great Authors, to hone their craft by practicing rhyme and metre, because “There can be no creation before imitation.” Yet the literary forebears who inspire the Libertines were themselves convention-flouting visionaries: Blake, Whitman, Dostoevsky, Yeats, Rimbaud.
So they opt instead for a radical break from tradition and, indeed, from all orthodoxy. “Extraordinary men propel us forward,” they declare. “It is our duty to break the law.” And break the law they certainly do: vandalism, theft, even murder, but above all, drugs. Uppers, downers, psychedelics – through Burroughs they have access to a veritable pharmacopia.
Booze and drugs, consumed in copious volumes, fuelled the Beat movement, from its beatific insights to its destructive impulses. These stimulants freed Ginsberg and his comrades from the shackles of self-consciousness. “First thought, best thought” was their motto and, when the words started, they rapidly became a flood. Kerouac claimed to have written his seminal book On the Roadduring a three-week binge of Benzedrine and “spontaneous prose”.
In Kill Your Darlings, this mania is vividly captured in the rhythmic, insistent clack-clacking of fingers at a typewriter. It’s almost a cliché of literary productivity. But what the film manages to convey is the sense of desperation that lies behind and ahead of each word being tapped out. Adolescent Allen Ginsberg faces down many horrors: domestic breakdown, institutional authority, desire corrupted into brutality. None of these, however, is so great as the horror of the empty page.
The visual arts equivalent is the blank canvas – a medium and a subject that Maja Maljevic tackles with gusto in Horror Vacui (at David Krut Projects, 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, until 21 June). The Latin title of the exhibition is a multivalent phrase used to describe both how “nature abhors a vacuum” and when artists, driven by the same abhorrence, fill every inch of a surface with detail.
At first sight, Maljevic’s work does not quite fit the latter definition. There appear to be bands of consistent colour in her oil paintings and large patches of white in her monotype prints. On closer inspection, one discerns layers of paint resulting in uneven coloration, splotches and trickles, or paper shading across a spectrum from light to dark. Further “texture” is provided in a note on Maljevic’s method by Jacqueline Nurse, depicting a strategy of “breaking the spell of the whiteness of the surface in order to open it up to manipulation”.
Maljevic “recreates a sense of the studio in the gallery” by hanging the images with minimal wall space between them, just as the canvasses were “crammed together” while she worked on them simultaneously. This has produced recurring motifs across the exhibition. Although the images are mostly abstract and geometrical, there are hints of mimesis – of compounded shapes that accumulate into recognisable forms. 
I preferred the large oil paintings to the smaller prints. There is an element of the whimsical, of the deliberately naïve or even childlike. But alongside these doodles and dabs are bold, brash colours and lines that demand attention and transfix the eye. The combined effect is one of innocence and lyricism matched with a paradoxical heaviness – what Nurse calls the “overwhelming intensity that is the signature effect of Maljevic’s work”. 

Maja Maljevic does not abhor a vacuum

‘Bold, intense and chaotically colourful’ are just some words to describe Maja Maljevic’s paintings.
Graeme Shackleford | 
Known for works in which every inch of canvas is filled with detail, the artist’s new exhibition, Horror Vacui, places the emphasis on her working methods.
“The size of the studio is, and always has been, a factor of where I live and what space is available to me in my place of residence,” said Maljevic.
“Until recently, the nature of the studio space has not consciously affected the way I think about my work, but it has always had an impact on the way in which I process and produce it.”
In the studio, a 3m x 4m room in her Westdene home, the artist’s paintings loom over her, “competing for her attention”.
“This creates a… claustrophobic but charged atmosphere that I am not only comfortable with, but inspired by,” she said.
Maljevic described her use of colour as “instinctive” and said it was something she had always responded to and understood.
“I enjoy the way [colours] can blend and clash together, and how a harmony can be created out of the chaos… My work is not made to blend in to the background,” she said.
“Every colour, line and mark is necessary for the work and to what each work is trying to say.”
The exhibition title, which borrows from the Latin phrase meaning “Nature abhors a vacuum”, is an appropriate description of this body of work, but does it mean that Maljevic abhors a vacuum?
“I do not abhor a vacuum. Blank spaces are invitations to fill. Studios need to be filled with work and canvases to paint,” she said.
“It is the vacuum around a thing that differentiates it from others and makes it into a thing, rather than a part of the emptiness.”
While studio size has a direct influence on Maljevic’s work, indirectly influencing her is life in Joburg.
“[It] finds its way into my paintings through the pace and energy of the city, rather than through… direct depiction. The busy-ness of Johannesburg and the emotional feeling one gets from living here certainly [is] an indirect influence,” she said.


 Horror Vacui
Opening Thursday 8 May 2014
18h00 for 18h30 at 142 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood

David Krut Projects is pleased to present Maja Maljević’s latest body of work, Horror Vacui, which follows on from her solo project, Ex Nihilo, which showed in Cape Town in 2012. In Ex Nihilo – a Latin term meaning ‘from nothing’, referring to anything that appears to have sprung into existence independently – Maljević asserted herself as creator of a self-sufficient world of colour, shape and line. This project again borrows a term from Latin:horror vacui, in science meaning “nature abhors a vacuum” and in visual art referring to work in which the entire surface is filled with detail. While both these meanings are appropriate in summing up Maljević’s paintings, in this project there is an emphasis on her working methods. By revealing the nature of the studio, new light is shed on the paintings that come out of it.
Maljević works across a range of scales; on the one end, paintings can be as small as 30x30cm or so, while the largest measure approximately 2m across. Considering these dimensions, one imagines a vast space in which each painting has room to breathe; one imagines the artist walking between them, comparing them from a distance, or working on one without another entering her frame of reference. However, Maljević’s studio in her Johannesburg home is a small room, measuring approximately 3 x 4m, making work on such large canvasses challenging to say the least. Furthermore,Maljević prefers to work on a number of paintings at once, stacking them against each other, filling every available space with a canvas surface.
In previous exhibitions, Maljević has employed a traditional method of installing her paintings in gallery spaces – all works with reasonable room between them, hanging all on the same midline, creating a respectable, uniform rhythm quite unlike the chaos of the small studio. With Horror Vacui she breaks with her norm, recreating a sense of the studio in the gallery. Paintings are crammed together, with little room between them, the walls of the gallery a blank canvas to be filled with the forms of the paintings. By stacking up horror vacui – in the studio, in the paintings and the gallery installation – traces remain of the close proximity of the artist to the works throughout their creation, felt by the viewer as the overwhelming intensity that is the signature effect of Maljević’s work.
Text by Jacqueline Nurse, April 2014





MAJA MALJEVIC
(and Abstraction after Manet)

In 1863, Édouard Manet painted Olympia and, in so doing, instigated the reinvention of painting. Suddenly, painting was liberated from what in the twentieth century has been referred to as the “tyranny of appearance” and the “picture-object” was born – ‘the picture as pure materiality, as simple coloured surface’[1]. Every generation of painters following in the wake of Manet were affected by his explosion of the beliefs and traditions of the canon, from Impressionism to Minimalism and beyond. In other words, the development of modern painting entailed the systematic rejection of the importance of imitating the appearance of things in favour of new methods that reveal the hidden relations between things.

To have an idea of how painting has developed from Manet through the twentieth century is meaningful when considering painting now, and especially abstract painting, because with the birth of the picture-object a new kind of viewer has emerged, whose responsibility it is to create meaning, as opposed to meaning being dictated by the artist. To view a painting in relation to others and in relation to movements that may have influenced its creation can often provide the viewer with a legend by which to begin reading it. When considering the work of Maja Maljevic, the grand overarching narrative becomes even more significant because her own relationship with painting has followed a very similar plot.

Maja Maljevic was born in Belgrade, the capital of what today is Serbia, in 1973. She began to consider herself an artist from as early as high school, when she decided to study within the design department in preparation for tertiary studies in the arts. Acceptance into the University of Arts Belgrade depended on producing a portfolio of sufficient quality to meet the stringent demands of the faculty. Once accepted, a gruelling seven years of training followed, of which the first few years consisted purely of academic and classical arts education – drawing and painting from life, the nude, portraiture, still life and the attendant classical theory. Once this solid traditional foundation had been laid, the fledgling artists were set free to discover for themselves what kind of practitioners they wanted to be. For Maljevic, like so many artists post-1863, this meant unlearning how to draw – as Picasso famously quipped, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

Maljevic cites the German Expressionists as a major early influence, and has also drawn inspiration from the work of more recent artists such as Philip Guston, Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat. She relates that in her first few years at university she loved more than anything to draw the sculptures of Michelangelo, smitten with the bold and monumental perfection of his work, which was simultaneously so real and unreal. Alongside the visual arts she has often expressed the impact on her work of growing up with the sounds of new wave, punk, rock and roll and then later grunge music, which formed a big part of her everyday life. All these things, in the life of an abstract painter, contribute to the pictures she paints, painting being a procedure involving the ‘excavation of memory and taste’[2]. However, although she works intuitively, her concerns are predominantly formal. Her interest, for instance, in the relationship between two shapes within a composition is informed primarily by an interest in the shapes themselves rather than the arrangement’s capacity to be symbolic of an experience or representative of an essential emotional state. In as much as Maljevic unravelled her traditional training in order to find her own voice, her grounding in the academic and the classical allowed her to bloom through abstraction, engaged in an act of creation that sidesteps diegesis.

Maljevic’s particular style, in which she has been training herself since then, begins with the “dirtying” of the canvas with a layer of bright paint that breaks the baldness of the white surface and opens up the space for Maljevic’s intuitive jigsaw endeavour. Onto this ground, Maljevic builds up surfaces with drips, blocks, bands and waves of colour, searching for harmony between colour and form, line and shape, expansive surface and small detail. For Maljevic, physical movement is an important part of the process – never can she be found sitting at an easel. Through her own version of gestural abstraction, Maljevic prevents the composition from becoming staid and self-indulgent, as she has puts it, and allows action and conflict to occur between the different elements with which she is engaged. Sometimes Maljevic incorporates fragments of the world as it is happening around her while she paints, but without dictating their significance to the viewer. Maljevic’s description of her own process recalls Kandinsky, the synesthetic predecessor who sought to create visual music: ‘When I combine objects, it is not a play on their meaning and what they should represent, but rather how they clash, feed from each other, create chaos and from that chaos a perfect sound is made, like too many notes that end up forming harmony. You take one out and everything collapses.’

Text by Jacqueline Nurse, April 2012


[1] Nicolas Bourriaud in ‘Michel Foucault: Manet and the Birth of the Viewer’, an introduction to Michel Foucault’s Manet and the Object of Painting. Tate, 2009.
[2] Thomas Nozkowski describing his own creative process in an interview with Francine Prose, published in BOMB 65/Fall 1998





Maja Maljević’s “Nirox Diaries”

http://davidkrutprojects.com/14205/maja-maljevics-nirox-diaries

Maja Maljević was recently in residence at NIROX Foundation from 2 September to 17 September with German artist Tatjana Doll. Towards the end of her stay, she also met another renound German artist Jürgen Partenheimer, who is currently in residence at NIROX. For Maljević, the opportunity to spend time with two dynamic and sophisticated painters made a huge impression. She was able to immerse herself in the solitude and idyllic surroundings of the Cradle of Humankind, frequented only by mischievous monkeys that ventured into her personal studio while she worked.
During her two week sojourn at the Foundation Maja worked intensively on 24 small-scale paintings the size of which is comparable to an A4 page. The series of paintings is titled Nirox Diaries. The paintings are special and rather quirky in the way that each one is marked with the exact time and date it was completed. Many of the oil paintings were worked on simultaneously to allow the thicker paint to dry in between layers.
The small scale of the paintings becomes reminiscent of a journal which is reflected in Maljević’s way of working. Her use of cryptic titles and coded alphabet that explode across sections of her work further alludes to the idea of a secret journal. Her paintings are reflections of the abstract ideas and feelings that flood her subconscious using colour and form to write her thoughts across the surface. The 24 paintings seem to allude to the hours in a day; a reminder of passing time that is weighed upon in a diary that plans a day or documents personal thoughts over a period of one’s life.



The “Nirox Diaries” were featured at the David Krut Projects booth at this year’s FNB Joburg Art Fair. For more information on the selected paintings available on our website please contact the gallery on 011 447 0627 or email taryn@davidkrut.com / claire@davidkrut.com

INSPIRATIONAL BOARD

http://www.agitpop.me/?0535479A

  1.   Peter Stuyvesant (9 mg tar, 0.8 mg nicotine)     
  2.  Plastic Building Blocks
  3. Plastic Mask of a Sheep
  4. Jil Sander Eau De Toilette – SUN
  5. “Martin Kippenberger” edited by Doris Krystof and Jessica Morgan
  6. “Look And Learn Book 1967” by Fleetway Publications
  7. Wooden model of a skeleton
  8. “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle” by Haruki Murakami
  9. “Knitted Christmas Beard” by Dejan Dosljak
  10. Anodized Aluminium Kitchen Knives
  11. Bicycle Playing Cards
  12. BIC Lighter
  13. The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Sixth Edition
  14. Callipers
  15. “The Little Prince” by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  16. LEGO
  17. Vaseline
  18. Guzzini Salt and Pepper Shakers
  19. Temori Dolls by Sanja Postic
  20. Skipping Rope
  21. Pocket Knives
  22. Bonsai Scissors
  23. Orange
  24. Tin Aeroplane
  25. Helping Hand
  26. Plastic Mask of a Lion
  27. Transistor Radio
  28. “Fargo” by the Cohen Brothers
  29. Russell Hobbs Kettle
  30. Ray Ban Sunglasses
  31. “Body Language” by Desmond Morris
  32. “Thin Lizzy Gold” by Thin Lizzy
  33. “Think Tank” by Blur
  34. Plastic Model of a Vespa
  35. Dumbbells – 1.5 kg each
  36. “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” directed and produced by Tobe Hooper



Johannesburg Kultcha : Kultcha / Exhibitions

Bubble and Leak

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 VIEW EXHIBITION


For some people; like my girlfriend Kae, the idea of art or even going to an art exhibition, is a romantic concept. So seeing as Valentines Day was looming, I thought it would be ingenious if we made our way to the David Krut Projects space on Jan Smuts Avenue on what was turning out to be a typical lazy Saturday afternoon. We had a look at Bubble and Leak; the latest showing by Maja Maljevic.

I was expecting to score a few brownie points with my art critic's persona (one arm behind my back and the other hand on my chin; rubbing contemplatively as I "examined the art"). I was hoping to be staring at a few "pretty pictures" that weren't too conceptually demanding - That would have done very nicely. Instead as soon as we had arrived we were confronted by large scale panels of seemingly playful, yet vaguely uneasy oil paintings- which had a grunge inspired edge to them. All with a distinctive use of colour, where abstracted and/or figurative forms, and sometimes scribbles of illegible text revealed themselves.

Just when it seemed as if Kae and I were getting used to the large gestured, whimsical yet slightly melancholy paintings, we noticed that amidst the larger paintings were smaller monotype prints; where the artist?s emotions were much more focused.

Nothing is as it appears with this artists work; the subtext and meaning is as layered as her canvases. I'm willing to bet that underneath all those bright colours are layers of angstful meaning. But hey, that's just my gut feeling. Check it out the show for yourself.

If you find yourself in the Parkwood area between now and the 19th of March; give this show a peek, it's filled with raw emotion and might just surprise you; just like Kae did on our way home when she said "Cool art works 'ey?"   

 

The New Spell - New York

Presented by David Krut Projects

June 5, 2008- July 30, 2008

Reception: June 5, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, Nina Barnett, Robyn Nesbitt

David Krut Projects, New York is pleased to present The New Spell, an exhibition of contemporary South African art curated by Lucy Rayner, with artists Themba Shibase, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo, Maja Maljevic, Nina Barnett, and Robyn Nesbitt.

With a certain shift in tone, an equivocal and satirical vocabulary has developed within the language of recent South African art. Artists are teasingly subverting contemporary politics and societal norms with a liberated sense of detachment and satiric self-reflexivity. Works are consciously current, sometimes self-consciously hip, and self-consciously oppositional. Bringing together the work of six artists who share an affinity for a particularly vulgar aesthetic, The New Spell aims to consider one of the many enlivening tendencies within this socially aware and outspoken approach.

The exhibition explores how the grotesque is exercised through works of art to reveal the fetish in African social and political relations of power. The term ‘fetish’ has become somewhat voguish and hackneyed of late. Essentially, it is the attribution of value or power to an object or way of thinking, but it is used here as an ironic comment on the ‘rational’ mindset of state-sanctioned culture in Africa.

By contemplating the grotesque in works by Shibase, MacGarry, Mntambo, Maljevic, Barnett and Nesbitt, The New Spell hopes to invite viewers to consider such relations of power with a greater sense of intimacy – and perhaps even humor – by moving beyond the binary categories of autonomy versus subjection or resistance versus passivity. The works kidnap instances of the fetish and force them to examine their own vulgarity, exposing ways in which official culture in South Africa is characterized by a distinctive style of improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion.

Curator Lucy Rayner and three of the artists, Michael MacGarry, Nandipha Mntambo and Robyn Nesbitt, will be present at the opening.


http://www.artthrob.co.za/07jul/listings_gauteng.html#afag2
Richard Smith Robertus van der Wege, Johan Botha and Maja Maljevic
Bicycle invitation image

'Bicycle' at Artspace Fine Art Gallery Artspace Fine Art Gallery Johannesburg presents 'Bicycle', an exhibition by Robertus van der Wege, Johan Botha and Maja Maljevic. In the show, these three artists explore the theme of bicycles in their own unique ways.
In a collective statement, the artists say: 'Bicycles are the world's foremost means of transport. They do not cost much to acquire and do not cost much to maintain. They do not require fuel, which means those without money can still afford to acquire them. More people use bicycles than any other mode of transport in the world.
American born van der Wege uses this idea as the starting point for his bicycle sculptures. Van der Wege, who has just moved to South Africa, noticed how many more people in America use bicycles than here in South Africa. Van der Wege's concern is an environmental one: his bicycles either exist on their own or become somehow incorporated into nature.
Botha expresses how he has found the idea of articulating narrative on a canvas constricting. Therefore he employs the graphic novel format in his paintings. Each work is separated into a number of frames and each work too employs a different painting technique befitting each storyline. Botha says that the painting is fuelled by the story, which is fundamentally the focus of his paintings.
Belgrade-born Maljevic paints in a similar way, although her paintings are not inspired by a preconceived narrative. The painting depicts the narrative. Her painting is intuitive and the shift between the painting techniques she employs in each frame has become a signature. She oscillates between the formal and what is purely abstract in one frame. From tight painting to a freer brush mark to the found object, her canvases aim at pure expression.
Brenden Gray will deliver an opening address. Also watch the press for details about a discussion around the work on Saturday July 21.
Opens: July 14
Closes: August 11



http://www.sandtontourism.com/pages/News_Display.asp?SectionID=1198&NewsID=183&NewsSectionID=1

Maja Maljevic - 2 Months Thursdays and SA Fashion Week Collaborations
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
This exhibition is part of the ongoing David Krut Print Workshop (DKW) Monotype Project involving six young artists who, over the last two months, have collaborated with DKW printers to create a series of works which will be featured both at the Parkwood Workshop gallery as well as the Arts on Main space.

The second part of the monotype exhibition programme will open on Thursday 7 October at 6pm at The Workshop gallery @ 140 Jan Smuts Ave, Parkwood, featuring works by Fred Clarke, Alexandra Makhlouf, Vulindlela Nyoni, Stompie Selibe and Jessica Webster.  

David Krut Projects @ 142 Jan Smuts presents an exhibition including the extraordinary works of International artist, Julian Opie.
SA Fashion Week CollaborationsMonotype with Guillotine
10 minute performances at 7pm and 9pm, 29 September
This innovative performance piece will consist of fashion, design, sound, movement and printmaking. Location: David Krut Print Workshop, Arts on Main.

Collaborators: Lisa Jaffe of Guillotine, Architect Eduardo Cachucho, Printmakers Jillian Ross and Mlungisi Kongisa, Artist Maja Maljević, Musician João Orecchia, Grethe Fox and Project Manager Brendan Copestake.

http://davidkrut.book.co.za/about/

David Krut Projects, Johannesburg

DSCN0954-300x225
Launched in March 2007, David Krut Projects is a seperate location a few doors down from our Bookstore and print Workshop. The Project/Gallery space has hosted a number of exhibitions, book launches and other events, including the launch of William Kentridge Flute, Andzrej Nowicki, The Pre-Crapelites, Brooklyn-based Cannonball Press, Art Bank JHB, Ryan Arenson, Diane Victor, Deborah Bell, Julian Opie, Maja Maljevic, Virginia MacKenny, Alexandra Ross, Willem Boshoff, Alice Maher, Gail Behrmann, Nathaniel Stern, and many more.

Joburg gets a new art gallery


13 September 2004
A trendy new gallery has opened in what is fast becoming Johannesburg's premier art, design and antiques belt. Moja Modern, a New York Chelsea-style gallery, offers contemporary art by both established and upcoming South African artists at affordable prices.
The gallery is the initiative of artists Rhett Martyn, James Delaney and Trae Tellard, who were inspired by the creativity of young South Africans but frustrated by the lack of space for artists to showcase their work.
"We are in the midst of a new culture which is creating and defining itself, where ideologies are converging", says curator Rhett Martyn. "It's unlike any other culture in the world. This is the time to watch and collect South African art."
Moja Modern combines the New York chic of clean white walls, cement and glass with knowledgeable staff, good music and a warm, friendly vibe.
There's art to suit all tastes at prices to match all budgets. "We also want to encourage first-time art buyers", says Delaney. "We have so much wonderful local art, and we want to make it accessible to everyone. There's no reason to hang boring prints when people can afford original works."
The gallery incorporates a novel feature, popular in California, designed for those who want to hang real artworks on their walls but don't have a huge budget. Sliding screens (or "racks") will show off etchings, sketches, drawings, numbered prints and other smaller works, ranging in price from R500 to R5 000 - real art by real artists, at very accessible prices.
Each month Moja Modern will have a new show around a curated theme, featuring established and emerging contemporary artists. That means there will always be a variety of work on show, with abstract contemporary figurative paintings, sculpture, photography and other media.
The opening show is "Warm Red Cavern", with works that explore the meaning and symbolism of the colour red by artists including Bronwyn Miller, Luan Nel, Kevin Collins, Trasi Henen and Maja Maljevic.
So it's red oils, red sculptures, communist themes and even art by a redhead! This show runs from 19 August to 17 September.
The Moja Modern gallery is at 16 7th Avenue (corner 3rd) Parktown North in Johannesburg. For more information, visit the MojaModern website.

http://www.artsouthafrica.com/?issue=64


http://www.highpointprintmaking.org/downloads/Presstime_Spring_10.pdf

 

http://www.obertcontemporary.com/artist_press.aspx?ar=27

the fine art of taking revenge

by fred de vries (the weekender august 5-6 2006) call it a confession, or call it invasive, paintings that reveal personal details about the subject cross the fine line between art and privacy � and are an increasingly popular way to reflect edgy angst young british artist award winner tracey emin caused a furore in 1995 with her installation titled �everyone i have ever slept with (1963-1995). during its display two years laterin the sensation show in london, visitors gawked at a blue tent appliqued with the names of all tracey�s bedmates, including family members and abortions. the tent was a piece of postmodern exhibitionism, part of emin�s obsession with confession art. while one compassionate former lover called it �a desperate plea for love and reassurance�, another of tracey�s ex-boyfriends, punk singer billy childish, was less chuffed about his name appearing in extra large letters opposite the entrance. revenge came in a poem he penned called i�d rather you lied. one of the canvases in the johannesburg home of maja maljevic bears a conceptual resemblance to emin�s work. central to the painting is a vaguely cubist drawing of a man with a blue and black face, holding a cigarette. it is framed by lines of intimate text: �thats a nasty thing to say cmon i really like you jus going thru sum stuf now thnks for comin last nte my life is very complicated.� underneath is a cellphone number. this number, explains maljevic, belongs to michael whitehead, leader of joburg rock heros jim neversink. the text is taken from smses he sent her. so what will michael make of this piece of confession art? he knows! maljevic exclaims. �and he doesn�t care.� the fact that they have (had) something intimate (an affair, a one-night stand, or unrequited love) is the reason for this painting, and it raises questions about art and privacy. her art, she explains, is a way of dealing with the personal. yes, call it therapy. and no, she doesn�t care whether her subject minds or not. the painting leans against a wall in the bedroom of her greenside flat. she glances at it once more, then returns to the living room, which doubles as a studio. so, did michael see it? he did! he liked it. but then said �oh, but my phone number is there� which he would not have realised if i had not told him. �i have this need to make sense of things happening in my life that won�t last � a little moment,� she explains. �for me every moment is important, and this was a way to make it important. otherwise it would blow, phew, just like that. i saw something i could do with it. it is the perfect material. when i sell it, it is gone, and i don�t think about it.� whitehead can rest assured. the piece has been sold to a private collector. in terms of exhibitionism, maljevic�s canvas doesn�t match emin�s nylon. while emin gives names, maljevic give us anonymous content. with her, the vulnerability lies not with the artist, but with the subject. the artist is the one who escapes virtually unscathed. we can only guess at her replies to whitehead�s confused sms�s. we can only wonder what kind of relationship blossomed or died behind these words. possibly the difference in expression has to do with the generation gap. born in 1973, maljevic is exactly 10 years younger than emin, not part of that brash generation that grew up in the schizophrenic 1980s, with punk burning out and yuppiedom taking over. her formative years were the 1990s in yogoslavia, where the collapse of communism signalled the end of stability. born and raised in the capital, belgrade, she fondly remembers the days of the mythical communist dictator tito, who died in 1980. she was seven years old then, and like other children, was taught to love tito more than her father. clearly, it worked. �tito was awesome,� she says, �it was the best time in our life�. countering my disbelief, she raises her voice. �you can ask anyone from our country! our passport was like an american passport. you didn�t need a visa, not even for america. when you went to poland or hungary, you felt like a rich man, you went skiing. it was lovely, lovely, lovely. awesome.�
tito�s death left a gaping hole. eventually, the power vacuum led to a gruesome ethnic war that lasted nearly 10 years. for maljevic, the date march 9 1991 symbolised the end to a carefree life. �i was 17, in high school. we had the first big demonstrations and elections. they came with tanks and sprayed us with tear gas. i was with my first love and thought: what�s happening? a policeman wand a student died. it was really bad. then the war started.� subsequently, yugoslavs left their country in droves. many of them came to south africa. �they were helped by an agency called beo africa, white africa. they came with one suitcase, and were booked in a hillbrow hotel for months. it wasn�t hard to get papers.� maljevic packed her bags in 2000, straight after finishing art school in belgrade. she had a brother and a cousin in johannesburg. �i didn�t know anything about south africa. it was very tough in the beginning. i�m used to city life. and suddenly you�re in a suburb where nothing is happening. for entertainment, they take you to a mall. very depressing. but i quickly met nice and lovely people�. in terms of city life, johannesburg may have been a bit disappointing. but what the metropolis did offer was a ready market. maljevic�s first solo exhibtion of almost 30 oil paintings last year in the elegant obert contemporary gallery in melrose arch sold out completely. next was a group show sponsored by pam golding in which she had five paintings. all of them changed hands for neat sums of money. recently, she finished a commission for the reception of the raphael hotel on nelson mandela square in sandton. joburg beats belgrade hands down. �in yugoslavia, you can get exposure and fame. but people don�t have money to buy art,� she says. �here, the art scene is very poor, not very professional. anyone will say �i�m an artist.� she uses bright colours, big strokes and thick layers of paint. although she cites michelangelo�s �ballsy work� as her main inspiration, her jagged style has much more in common with jean-michel basquiat. but more than art, it is rock music that inspires. as a child of the 1990s, she was influenced by grunge, nirvana, pearl jam and a dozen others who searched for despair in an era that pretended to shine with boundless optimism. her colours mix and resonate like distorted chords; teh extraterrestrial figures refer to the sci-fi quality of experimental electronica; the melancholy of americana is reflected in her wrought faces. her ultimate here is american band queens of the stone age, purveyors of riff heavy robot metal, whose lyrics feature in some of her paintings: �laws of man pretend, they ain�t mine, love so good love so bad, it won�t die, some talk too long, they know it all, i just smile and move on.� here paintings reflect a desire for the wild hallucinogenic side of planet rock. and escapist world of sprawling colours, inhabited by awkward musicians and quaint spacemen. she is a victim of the 1990s. a week later, i bump into whitehead. no, he doesn�t care that she used his text and phone number. �but�, he says, �it will give me the right to use her in one of my songs.� our own tracey and billy.

art pick of the week

by brenton maart (mail and guardian 30 september 2005) A grey area, fraught with conceptual angst, is the interface between traditional and new forms of art production. It is here that issues of craft mastery, meditative time and archival capacity come face-to-face with the distrust of the "new", the relative ease of production and the perceived fickle nature of young contemporary culture. It is thus illuminating to encounter a show like the Melrose Art Group Show. Zimbabwe-born Kudzi Chiurai exhibits his mixed-media and spraypainted work that are both reflective of his home country and of a global youth street culture. Peter Eastman joins forces with Matt Hindley to show a series of digitally derived images. These, along with the floral prints/paintings by Henry Symonds, are ironically hand-crafted digital images rendered via a process of photographic printing. Mark Erasmus represents here the South African arm of new European painting, where an analysis of colour and application of geometry questions the validity of traditional painting in a "global village" defined by almost infinitely crossing lines. Belgrade-born Maja Maljevic contributes a series of magnificent oil-on-canvas works that use a traditional form of expression to interrogate contemporary cultural icons
melrose art runs through 11 october 2005 at obert contemporary in melrose arch, johannesburg.

Fact and Fiction

Zingi Mfeka (This week's must see - Sunday Times 24 July 2005) Maja maljevic's "fact and fiction" invites a different, more old-school method of appreciation that values intuition and imagination over concept and innovation, fiction over fact. And what beautiful fiction it is. Maljevic's work is reminiscent of the style of respected south african painter Robert hodgins, whom maljevic claims to admire. "I like his work and I think we approach art in the same way," she said.
"fact and fiction" follows an explorative, playful and childlike rhythm, requiring you to create your own story as you look at the work. What makes maljevic's work immediately appealing is her bold use of colour. "fact and fiction" is her first abstract body of work that has incorporated various characters, who inevitably hint at some narrative. But none of the works are titled because, for maljevic, a title would force a particular reading of her work, robbing the viewer of the pleasure of creating their narrative based the characters they see. Hence, whatever fiction crops up in your head is a valid as a fact. Born and raised in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, maljevic moved to south Africa in 2000 to join her brother. Since her arrival, she has exhibited at various group shows. "fact and fiction" is her second solo exhibition in Johannesburg. It ends 31 july 2005.
maja maljevic
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