Tijana Knezevic - Artist

Tijana Knezevic is a multi-media artist who mostly uses drawing as her chosen medium. Her drawings are often of strange, modernist architectural spaces with a surreal, dream-like aspect that they are sometimes combined with imagery from her own dreams. This blend of the subconscious with the boxy Communist architecture of 50s, 60s and 70s Yugoslavia recalls the surrealists use of obsolete cultural artefacts and buildings, and the relationship of these to the uncanny and the subconscious.

“I have found drawing to be the most suitable medium for expressing the aesthetic and conceptual concerns I have developed in recent years.

“In the area in which I’ve been developing, aesthetics has increasingly become a redundant aspect: in many art circles its presence is seen to actually decrease the quality of other features of the work.

“I have decided to attempt to take the aesthetic features of my own work to the limit. The tried and tested methods of conceptualism have given good results, but in my own work I consider them to be a by the way intervention. The main line of my development is what I already stated at the beginning; to always seek methods for expression, not necessarily the most original, but the most suitable and adequate tools, for a hedonistic style of drawing, an urban motif, a minimalist conversation.

“I opt the least amount of intervention in a social context; I’ve never thought of my work as having, in any greater or lesser sense, any further-reaching effects upon society.

“What interests me is the concrete feeling, actual event. I try to think about the meaning of my work exclusively at the level of the first impact, leaving all other analyses for the period after showing, for the time when the work is actualised.”