05.05.–10.07.2011
Exhibition in the Great Hall

Maja Vukoje

In her large format paintings Maja Vukoje addresses discursive issues such as postcolonialism, gender, and popular culture. Based on her own migration experience,
Maja Vukoje is particularly interested in syncretic cultural phenomena, which she investigated on research trips, such as to the Caribbean Carnival in Tobago. These presentations of collective rituals, gestures, and moments of transformation inhabit stage-like suburban scenes from New Belgrade. Different cultural contexts blend in her paintings, where the artist is always seeking an archetypal version of individual experiences.

Through her specific painting technique
Maja Vukoje further alienates and dramatizes what is depicted. Her work is characterized by an artistic language operating on the highest level that exploits all the possibilities of painting. The wealth of pictorial forms of expression created by the use of combs, putty knives, stencils, flowing paint, sprayed elements, and applications of real objects finds its counterpart in the somewhat undecipherable contextual meaning of the images.

In the exhibtion the artist showed works, which scale back the formal variability and emphasize inherent aspects of art, such as forming a consensus in the art world.

Maja Vukoje, born 1969 in Düsseldorf, lives and works in Vienna. She was raised in Belgrade and studied under Maria Lassnig and Christian Ludwig Attersee at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.