 |
|
Martina Petrovic Matkovic
 |
Award winning croatian academic painter My practice focuses on figurative and narrative painting, combining painting, drawing, and collage. I draw inspiration from the world around me – people, urban and city spaces, architecture, everyday situations, and fragments of my immediate surroundings – which I transform through painting and collage into personal and imaginative scenes. I am interested in the relationship between reality and imagination, and in the moment when the familiar world begins to take on a different, displaced meaning. In my paintings, everyday scenes become stages where the real and the imagined meet. Figures, animals, objects, architecture, and elements of nature are brought together in ways that may not always follow a logical order, yet create their own internal relationships and narratives. Collage is important to me not only as a technique, but also as a way of thinking and constructing an image. Cutting, moving, layering, covering, and reconnecting fragments allows me to deconstruct reality and reassemble it into something new. The layering of materials and visual elements reflects the way I experience the world – as a collection of scenes, memories, observations, associations, and imaginings that constantly overlap and interact. In my work, I explore the relationship between the individual and the spaces that surround them, as well as the relationship between external reality and the inner world. The city, nature, and architecture are not merely backgrounds to my scenes; they become active participants in the narrative. Space can expand, transform, and shift into the surreal, while everyday life takes on the qualities of a dream, a theatrical stage, or a symbolic landscape. I am drawn to symbols and to their openness to different interpretations. Animals, objects, ladders, windows, celestial bodies, figures, and various fragments appear as elements of a personal visual language, without necessarily carrying one fixed or predetermined meaning. Intuition and the possibility for meaning to develop through the process of making are important to me, as is the encounter between the work and the viewer. Colour, rhythm, visual density, and humour allow me to approach both serious and everyday subjects through a playful and uncanny visual language. I aim to create a sense that something familiar has suddenly shifted – that an ordinary scene has become a space where different relationships, rules, and stories are possible. My painting exists between the familiar and the unknown, the real and the imagined, the everyday and the surreal. I am particularly interested in these transitions and in the possibility of transforming an ordinary scene into a space for association, emotion, and a different perception of the world. |
Works of Art
|
