Maja Maljevic

After receiving her Master of Arts in the field of painting from the University of Arts in Belgrade, in 2000, Maja Maljevic moved to South Africa where she now lives and works as a full time artist in Johannesburg.

Maljevic makes use of bright colours, big strokes and thick layers of paint in her work. She cites Michelangelo as an important inspiration, though her jagged style has much more in common with the New York painter Basquiat. However, it is rock music that truly inspires her. As a child of the nineties she was influenced by grunge, where 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 has had successful solo exhibitions in South Africa and completed an important commission for the Raphael Hotel on Nelson Mandela Square in Sandton. She participated in a workshop at David Krut Print Workshop in 2007, and since then she has created several bodies of work with the DKW printmakers. In 2009 she had a solo exhibition at David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, called Into the Spine. She has participated in the Monotype Project workshop at DKW since July 2010 and was one of the six artists participating in the DKW Monotype Project exhibition in October 2010. Her second solo exhibition at DKP opened in early February 2011, called Bubble and Leak.

Maljevic writes, "I enjoy a visual ensemble that includes the figurative and the abstract, the organic and geometric, the obvious and the elusive. Put them all together and you get an eclectic remix where any one thing can be something else. A portrait can rise out of a still life, a still life can descend into a landscape, a finger is a toe and two legs, slightly parted, might be a whisper. To capture and describe my creative process is like putting music into words - something essential gets lost in translation. How can you record the emotional volume present in the art of listening?" (Text for the Spier Contemporary 2010).