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Eugster || Belgrade presents at miart 2024 new works from artist Julija Zaharijević, in a shared booth with Milan-based gallery eastcontemporary, in dialogue with Giulia Cretulescu.
This collaboration seeks to expand the dialogue between two young galleries with a common goal of bridging the gap between eastern and western European art scene.

Miart 2024
11th April preview upon invitation
12-14 April
Allianz MiCo, Pavillion 3
viale Luigi Scarampo, Milan

Find us at booth E34.

Julija Zaharijević’s practice deals with the accumulative nature and constant flow of images in our society. She works with different symbols, values and perceptions that surround us and that we give a certain meaning to. She uses painting, sculpture, text, performance, and different printing techniques in her multidisciplinary practice, always centering on the perception of the image as the focus point, throughout art history and the contemporary times.

The Cabbage series of works can be perceived as a focal piece to Julija’s practice in some way, both in the sense of having developed this way of communicating with the viewer, almost directly, with the cabbage head always being in eye level, the leaves opening up in their direction, and in the optical sense of a lens. One of the most important questions asked in her works, and that the artist always repeats to herself, deals with purpose – what is the purpose of the reality we see, and why do we feel the need to repeat it, reimagine it, and question it? The question comes up alone on itself when looking at the world that we have built by recreating and recycling surrounding images and motives in our globalized society. What are the real and the imaginary, the more realistic and fantastical things, and at what point can we tell them apart?

Julija Zaharijević’s Cabbage series tends to ask the viewer to take it as it is, on its own merits. In the presented works, newly made for the fair, the subtle and inviting details of its insides, or the actual heart of the head, distinguish them between themselves and make them so that the heads are, in a way, the performers of the artworks. Facing straight, the bodily reference works in an interesting way to embody a performer and “cultivate” a dialogue with the viewer – directly provoking a question of its presence and reality. This action is nicely represented in another one of Julija’s series of photographs, titled Flower people, in which each piece depicts a pair of two people, with cabbages where their heads are, in a sequence of poses; as if they’re in a silent communication with the lens, the drawn on eyes staring into the camera, with their bodies always touching. The sculptures have become the performers.

This series is accompanied by another new piece, Disillusioned, a copy, a 1m diameter low half-sphere with a print depicting the almost flat ceiling of Jesuitenkirche, in Vienna. Painted by Andrea Pozzo in 1703., the trompe- l’œil painting’s purpose is to play with the optical dimensions of the space. Following the same thinking of the image through art history, the artist works with the photograph of the painting to create a sculpture in the space, a negative of what the church dome would be. As we could also see in her solo show Modern Painting in Berlin, which showed the first half-sphere piece Goddess, a string that follows the works is rooted in perception – of time, modernity, nowness, nature, and always of the image in its context.