Touching Reflections
Jagoda Karać-Ivanov is a distinctive artistic personality. By sincere and creative vibrations, through play of lines and colours, she exhibits a quality of her drawings, arbesques, revealing values of a character with love and sense for psychological tone by touching reflections, a look...
Her spirit of adventure and freedom is at the service of the drawing. She gives it a stamp of truth and conviction by her sincerity while, through imagination and boldness, she links all characters by interweaving their destinies.
It is a well known fact that in fine arts a human figure dates back from prehistoric times(cave art), to reach its perfection in the period of renaissance, baroque, realism. At that time, it was important to save the portraited from oblivion- give him or her an expression of autonomous personality. That is precisely why Jagoda Karać-Ivanov, a portrait painter by inspiration, with her gifted eye and painter's knowledge, gives the drawn figures an expression of current mood: happiness, sorrow, curiosity, surprisedness, nostalgia, melancholy...
They are all present in our lives, our surrounding. We encounter them, recognize them in some feature of their face or a look, because Jagoda carefully observes characteristic features and, by interweaving lines, in an relaxed manner and without affectation, establishes a close relationship between the portraited and the observer, which is full of trust and understanding.
The artist, through an expression and gesture, as well as drawing skills, shows the uninvestigated world which she carries in herself. Using subtle colours, which are even pushed in a second plan, she manages to highlight colour of eyes, hair or hat, and penetrating into inner life and psychological traits of a character, offers interesting surprises.
Through succinct and reduced lines, revealing her great artistic skills, Jagoda managed to find a new and appropriate expression for her works, which are undoubtedly original and convincing.
A sense for geometry and style proves that everything is subjected to a unique concept.
Simple and crystallized contrasts, with their full momentum and power, represent a very expressive language which Jagoda Kara6-Ivanov uses to articulate her feeling for a composition, thus offering artistic vision so precious to us.
Zorica Đermanov
Art Historian
January 2009
Arabesque characters matrices of Jagoda Karać-Ivanov
Solo exhibition of drawings entitled Touching Reflections, gallery Singidunum, Belgrade, January 13-23, 2009.
It is beyond doubt that the line, amongst numerous means of contemporary artistic and media visual expression and thanks to its power of transformation, occupies the most important position. The difference between artistic perception of its potential and countless possibilities of using it in the world of mass communications, which are persistent in finding ever more lapidary and quickly perceptible sign repertoire readable through digital systems, certainly lies in unrepeatedness of the line drawn by the hand, a classic drawing tool.
To be a good drawer has for centuries also meant to be an analyst of the world, a careful designer of ones own work, which is two- or three-dimensional, but also a spirit which is not carried away by strong passions but a firmly linked eye-mind-eye in a closed circle, permanently and obsessively moving towards the object and towards a living being, and vice versa. To draw ones own perception with the line and enter into the essence of the others through infinitely changing direction of the line, its upward movements as well as interruptions - isnt it a basic postulate of this visual-art language which does not care for assignments outside its magic chain. But, when it does care it ceases to be only a drawing and becomes a part of a fruitful, natural symbiosis of language and image an illustration.
Ten-year long absence from the exhibition sector in the country (she has moved together with her family to New Zealand) could not sweep into oblivion the particularity of the style of Jagoda Karać Ivanov (born in 1961), an artist educated within the Belgrade school of drawing and graphics (graduated from and obtained a Masters degree at the Faculty of Applied Arts and Design of Belgrade in the class of professor Bogdan Krić), being one of the best schools in Europe.
The quality of her work has improved with her openness to Middle-European areas, however, together with a great tradition of surrealism and post-war fantastic tendencies. Still, the first historical parallel extends beyond home historical background, even towards Aubrey Beardsley and Cornelius Escher, because a contemporary home scene does not recognize examples of a developed linear mannerism which transforms itself into a great system of calligraphically precise repertoire of methods, reduction and reincarnation of real shape, into its ulterior, like a visual letter, symbolic variation.
Characters of her paintings come from milieus of big cities, fashion gatherings, but also from common people with a particularity which people from Dalmatia would call originali, while today the young call it simply freak. This is the very kind of people whom, when we pass by them only once, we would never forget if we had any developed interest for people and at least a slight visual memory. She does keep them in her memory and however much she loves them perhaps as very close persons, Jagoda makes, by using ultimately disciplined and flexible moves, out of their eyes, noses, hair, lips, hats, make-up, clothes, necks, cheeks, shoulders, something that is linear abstraction which emerges from flash and blood. But, this is still an arabesque which is more, or sometimes completely, outside real existence, condition of laughing, pain, tension...
Earlier cycle of drawings on the theme of Masks has asserted that preoccupation with paradox of hiding and revealing is actually long-lasting development rich in variations, because the face is the most expressive medium which, under the pressure of mimicry, even more intensively, through stopped lines or masks, expresses inner tension. That is why even Baudelaire in his Romantic Art praised bolder makeup (the moderate makeup has another purpose) as a bold expression of an individuality against averageness of the majority. Alone or in pairs, the characters of Jagoda Karać-Ivanov are actually not somebodys mothers or fathers, grand-mothers or grand-fathers, or lovers, namely they are not portraits as artistic discipline which is proud of being truthful ever since the Roman times. Their faces, clothes and hats are in fact essence of inner condition, touching reflections (light motifs of entire exhibition), so that in the Woman with a red hat we see several persons or only one who is multidimensional, who could be a model, extravagant woman artist, a vain rich woman, fashion victim, or only an admirer of vanguard style...
From a cycle entitled the Friends, a character is singled out who appears to undergo metamorphosis from a cult movie Cat People, where, in one scene, everything is, in a seemingly static character, moving and changing - lips, eyes, hair, and the female face transforms into a grasping, concentrated predatory muzzle, with a raised hackles on its head. In general, metamorphosis is a general feature of her methodology of visual field development. Actually, starting from a special form, face detail, the artist draws a line flexibly and without apparent interruptions and filigree-like meticulously towards other areas to finally fill, entirely in her manner, surface with dots, lines, meanders, as well as intervene inside them using solely wooden colors. And, while a great master of metamorphosis Archimboldo in the sixteenth century painted a woman with a face full with reptiles, fishes and corals as an allegory of water, Jagoda boldly uses a movement of the line, uninterrupted, meandric, self-consciously and powerfully in describing transformation of natural and real into surreal, symbolic, essential...
Consequently and diligently, with great knowledge of suggestive linear vocabulary, Jagoda pursues the very thread which human nature discloses to the world only in subtle hints, playing more or less sophisticated games of disguise, sheltering in front of others and with own super-ego the subtle layers of a human being whose perceptibility, as if under X-rays, emerges out of well-adhering mask.
By no means going into the field of mockery or caricature, the artist retains a moralizing and at the same time reconciling and bitter atmosphere of inevitable many-sidedness of human nature. Indicating a specific theatre of which we are part only as observers, she is fascinated with dynamics, change, dramatic tensions which form a two-dimensional drawing matrix. It is easy to imagine their animated versions, because they have an immanent illusion of movement, which is achieved with sophisticated drawing mannerism.
Was it not Crnjanski who, in his late dramatic works, disclosed a dual moral standard of times in which he lived, a decadent sexuality and vanity, and all this under the veil of the elite masked entertainment? Because, when passion ends, no mask adheres to human face, increasingly subtle, non-material, transparent...
Mirjana Vajdić Bajić,
Art Historian and Theoretician,
February 2009
SOLO 26, Tour d' Art
Jagoda Karać-Ivanov is an artist who is extremely interested in visualising people and human experiences. Her work is highly individualistic and reveals a desire to communicate her perceptions of humanity to the viewer. Tour d' Art is an exhibition that marks the twentieth year since the date of her first solo exhibition in Belgrade, Serbia.
Lower Hutt based artist, Karać-Ivanov works mainly in drawing and collage. She creates sophisticated portraits that show a psychological understanding of social interaction. Her mixed media works show distorted faces whose natural contours have been transformed into a fantastical and surrealistic world. The figures appear as behind masks viewing the world behind their external appearance. They are circus performers engaging in the balancing act of everyday life. She invites viewers to explore the textures and complexities of human interaction and communication.
Karać-Ivanov is interested in depicting ordinary people in order to show the truth behind our daily lives. She depicts figures that emerge out profound experiences and spiritual journeys. Her people often reference the deep underlying melancholy of the human condition.
Karać-Ivanov has a balanced and illustrative style that harks back to folk and mosaic art of Eastern Europe. Her works are complementary to her work as an accomplished graphic artist and recent forays into photography continues to explore ideas of human experience and her interest in geometrical elements and synthesis of colour. In Karać-Ivanov's photography, she is interested in depicting the transient and forgotten objects of everyday. Her artistic photography breaks with traditional ideas of composition and beauty.
All of Karać-Ivanov's art works are inflected with her observations of her surroundings and her focus on the beauty of small details. Karać-Ivanov looks to her environment and elevates the ordinary in an extraordinary.
SOLO 19
Within the generation of artists active on the Yugoslav scene in the course of the last decade, Mrs. Jagoda Karać-Ivanov, member of the Serbian Association of Applied Arts Artists and Designers since 1983, stands out by her sophisticated and distinctive approach to drawing as a basic medium of expression. Even more so for she originates and was educated in an environment which had been accepting readily new tendencies of the tumultuous changes in European art, enriching them with features of their own climate, primarily through their inclination towards colouristic expression.
The choice of pen and Indian ink resulted from the internal desire of Mrs. Karać-Ivanov to synthesize through a refined style and serious approach to art a long standing fascination with a modern megalopolis. A precise, supple stroke of her pen, fine geometrical elements, waving surfaces, and subtle colour interventions make her drawings unique, as perfectly balances arabesques.
A quiet elegance of her portraits has been made live by an expressive fantasy, transposing the natural contours of faces and costumes into amazing and surrealistic world. Her Masques cycle has grown into a specific theatre of urban environment in which the actors change permanently their makeup and costumes with irony, joy, or subconsciously. If we follow them attentively, we would recognize a deep psychologically studied typology, vivid and individual like the one existing in the streets of large cities of the world.
The eloquent, balanced and attractive drawing style of Mrs. Karać-Ivanov fits perfectly into various areas of graphic design and illustration: logo, poster, books for children and poetry. Its eloquence and elegance could be compared to the illustrations of Aubrey
Beardsley from the beginning of the 20th century.
Her decorative style reveals a designer with modern sensibility, who undertakes her task warmly and seriously, provoking not only the eye, but spirit too of the public for whom she creates the advertising message or illustration.