Art Brussels 2025

Ivana Štulić

Swivel Gallery is immensely proud to announce its representation of artist Ivana Štulić ahead of her dynamic solo presentation at this year’s Art Brussels Art Fair. Debuting a new collection of paintings that traverse through a combination of domestic and perceptive imagery that pierces the senses, the viewer is careened into a space that questions our concept of reality, memory, and our body’s reaction to inhabited space. At once eerie and ominous, the oil paintings freeze moments which usually take place in the corners of joint human experiences. 

April 24th - April 27th, 2025

Brussels EXPO, Belgium

In an evocative exploration of color and presence, Štulić explores the nuanced psychological and emotional interplay between the subtle ways in which color not only defines the physical space but also amplifies the intangible energies that permeate these environments. Suspense is central nerve associated with the artist’s work, as the viewer feels as the onlooker in Štulić’s work the anticipation of a moment, and our humanistic tendencies then relate these scenes to our own memories, installing ourselves in the minutiae of her imagery and often continuing the story based on our own realities. The suspension and apparent silence turns the canvas into a reflective space of contemplation, reconstructing the narrative which will eventually escape, and forcing the viewer to understand the inescapable multidimensionality of experience that characterizes every event, between consciousness and senses. The works are a pursuit of an ambitious anthropological and cognitive search with one of the most descriptive mediums, contorting the method of figuration as it has been traditionally approached, Štulić investigates how painting, as all our communication systems, will eventually inevitably fail in translating the complexly multilayered dimension of our experience in the world.  

In her new series for Art Brussels, Stulic emphasizes a dynamic pairing of yellow and red in the indoor scenes, infusing the space with vibrant energy, evoking a multitude of emotions. While red’s intensity and yellow’s warmth enliven the scene, Štulić employs them subtly, enhancing everyday environments with a palpable undercurrent.. These colors transcend mere physical presence, imprinting a resonance that lingers in the space long after the occupants have left. In contrast, the outdoor scenes are defined by the quiet neutrality of gray, a color that evokes detachment and subtlety. Štulić’s use of gray reflects upon the vastness of the environment, where energy diffuses and focus disperses. It mirrors the restrained, often reserved behavior we adopt in public spaces, capturing the essence of being exposed to social scrutiny, where presence is less amplified, and emotional energy more restrained.

Hailing from Croatia, Štulić’s Eastern European sensibility is clear, in all the artist’s starkness lies a philosophical way of observing societal behaviors, her labor intensive process and extreme perfectionism allows Štulić to surgically extract and transfer acute, minimal visual information through her realistic paintings, which begin as staged photographs of liminal atmospheres. Through this process the artist exercises and operates a deep cognitive and psychological analysis of her subjects, exposing them to their inescapable loneliness of experience. This methodology brings viewers to conflicts that can appear between the rational man and an irrational universe, between intention and outcome, or between subjective assessment and objective worth.

Štulić’s power lies in her ability to create indeterminacy for the viewer, making it unclear whether the viewer is inside or outside of the painting, shielded fully to events taking place on and beyond the canvas. This deliberation as the observer leads us to question further when and where our meaning-making process occurs, and what activates it? When, and how do we record, fully, our experiences and actions that are the makeup of our days? Eventually Štulić forces us to investigate the deeper essence of our existence, as individual and social beings made of mind, body and soul, consistently looking for connections between and beyond them. We are here, we exist, we perceive, and we contemplate everything in between, trying to make sense of a place that often escapes any rational code.