Dio Horia gallery presents Stronger Than You, a solo booth with works by young Serbian artist Maja Djordjevic. Maja Djordjevic creates multi-disciplinary works that look like computer doodles.
In reality they are traditional oil and enamel artworks performing some pixelated illusions. Djordjevic paints rectilinear shapes by hand, sketched out in an early kind of MacPaint program, where squares of color are so large as to prevent too much detail.
Her subject matter is usually a girl, most of the time that girl being herself, portrayed in various tragically and yet comical situations. The girl is often depicted naked exposing with a black vertical line a little scratch of her vagina and touching art history with feminine power and twists of the male and the female gaze. Her main color pallet enhances the playfulness of her works with various pinks and blues coloring her protagonists no matter where they find themselves at.
By translating the image from the digital into the tactile, analogue space of the framed painted canvas, Djordjevic is not interested at the technical innovation brought about by digital production of paintings, but rather – on the contrary – insists on the logic of the production of paintings as a space filled with meaning and, at the same time, manipulating meanings in a way through which it faces and falls short of the expectations and habits we have regarding painting as a historically based discipline.
Stronger Than You consists of five new paintings that are installed in between mirrors and female hand weights. The works and the installation looks into the hyperbole’s associated with today’s passion for mindfulness and passion for gymnastics. The exhibition comments on the human condition that is always under a lot of stress to achieve mind and body perfection rather than accepting that things are already semi-perfect as they are. In these works the artist portrays herself in her own micro cosmos exercising with ridiculous training methods and through them suggests that a laugh or two is always needed to get by.
On the occasion of EXPO Chicago the artist has created a limited edition series of 200 hand weights that will be released on September 27th with the opening of the fair and at the same time online at http://www.diohoria.com/eshop/. Release time is at 12pm CDT, 6pm BST.
