Join us for the opening
on Thursday 10 February
at
6:30pm at David Krut Projects (140 Jan Smuts Avenue,
Parkwood).
Maja Maljević will be on show at David Krut Projects
from February 2011. Her solo exhibition, Bubble and Leak, will consist of a
series of large oil paintings and selected prints. Maljević first
participated in a workshop at DKW in 2007 and since then has created several
bodies of work with the DKW printers. In 2009 she had a solo exhibition at David
Krut Projects in Johannesburg, called Into the Spine, and she has worked at the
Arts on Main workshop for the duration of the 2010 Monotype Project.
Maljević works intuitively using colours and forms,
sometimes words and figurative images as she paints. Her paintings usually begin
with a very bright, flat colour, thickly layered, as a base to
“break” the stark whiteness of the canvas. She says “I tried
to concentrate on the process of building and layering imagery, which is a
central concern of mine when painting.” Unlike most printers, she enjoys
the mistakes, mess and unintentional marks. She believes that if you don’t
create the layers, you don’t get the end result. The marks, whether
intentional or accidental, are integral to this
process.
Her work is undoubtedly a mark of her personality and
can’t be mistaken for anything else. As a child of the nineties she was
influenced by grunge, whose followers searched for despair in an era that
pretended to shine with optimism. Her bright colours mix and resonate like
distorted chords; and the melancholia is reflected in her characters. She swings
from pure abstraction to more figurative, from large scale work to tiny
painting. More
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