COLOUR BEFORE IMAGE, 2026: Maja Maljevic

Colour Before Image presents a body of work in which Maja Maljević shifts the hierarchy of painting, allowing colour to lead and the image to follow, if it settles at all. Here, colour is not descriptive or secondary. It acts first. It disrupts, constructs, and dissolves form in the same gesture.

Maljević’s practice resists the stability of the figure. Faces emerge only to recede, bodies fragment into fields of chromatic tension, and gestures hover between drawing and erasure. What remains constant is the insistence of colour as a psychological and spatial force. It carries mood, memory, and contradiction, often arriving before recognition, before language, before narrative.

Working through layers, interruption, and revision, the artist builds surfaces that feel both immediate and unsettled. Marks are asserted and withdrawn. Pigment is pushed, smeared, and held in suspension. In this space, colour becomes a site of negotiation rather than resolution. It refuses to behave, to describe, or to stabilise the image into something fixed.

The works in this exhibition operate in a state of becoming. They ask the viewer to remain within uncertainty, to encounter painting as an experience rather than a depiction. In doing so, Maljević proposes a reversal: not image first, then colour, but colour as the origin point from which all else hesitates into form.

In Colour Before Image, painting is returned to its most instinctive condition, where sensation precedes recognition and meaning remains open, shifting, and unresolved.