“To make something is to sound its own purpose, its own existence.”
Maja Maljević (b. 1973) grew up in the former Yugoslavia, where she enrolled in the school for design during her teen years, before continuing her formal education with the University of Belgrade’s Fine Arts department, where she graduated with a Masters degree in 1999. Maljević left Serbia for South Africa following the political unrest in her country of origin.
Maljević is an expressionist painter and printmaker that combines organic and geometric shapes to seek resonance in discordant ideas, allowing action and conflict to occur between the different elements with which she is engaged. The artist uses her work to explore the dynamism of positive and negative space, employing colour value to convey layered meaning. Reworking the formal mechanisms of Modernism to suit her contemporary needs as a multifaceted creator – painter, printmaker, sculptor – Maljević’s primary objective is coherence between all the individual elements within a composition, whether they are in conflict or co-existing harmoniously, thereby revealing the integral logic of the work.
“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 imagery assembled on the canvas without prior negotiation. The composition evolves as each part is painted. The painting becomes itself.
“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.”