Iva Kontic

Within is a series of paintings depicting three different panoramic views from windows, rendered almost life-size. In each painting, the cropped interior of a darkened house is juxtaposed with an architectural fragment of an urban landscape.

Based on an autobiographical reference, Within is inspired by the artist’s memories of her hometown, Belgrade. The work deals with the interweaving nature of memory, understood as a collision of fragments of intimate and collective “spatialities” and “objects” that materialise one’s experience.

Using a strongly apparent figurative realism as its formal language for constructing the images, together with the potential simulation of “real space” through their format, the Within series questions the very possibility of representing a reality bound to the past, the local, and the personal. Ultimately resulting in images that appear flat and undefined, the paintings’ intention to document and specify “there and then” remains suppressed and concealed from the viewer.