Press Release | Maja Djordjevic @ Taipei Dangdai 2022: Maja Djordjevic, 'The Metamorphosis' @ Taipei Dangdai, May 20 - 22, 2022

Maja Djordjevic is well known for her idiosyncratic intermingling of the meticulous technique and canonic elements of classical painting with a quasi-primitive digital rendering style and an ever-present sense of wry humor. In this project, Djordjevic investigates the phenomena of time and ephemerality through the use of the Renaissance tropes of memento mori and vanitas.

Where the artist’s earlier employment of the memento mori drew on the legacy of the Classical Renaissance and its visions of Humanism and the idealized perspectival visual mastery of the world, this series of paintings turns to the Baroque era. The Baroque, with its characteristic sensuous richness, grandeur, emotional exuberance, and focus on the notions of temporality has allowed Djordjevic to connect her ongoing engagement with internal states and life’s ephemerality with the timely yet timeless questioning of national, collective, and personal identity. Bringing the artist’s signature stick figure characters into play with Baroque’s key motives of ruins, roses, soap, candles, the hourglass, mirrors, gardens, and butterflies, these works create a space where the abiding concerns of the Renaissance era come to invade and crystallize the trappings and uneasy considerations of our own time and its daily lifestyle.