Relja Penezic

Artist Statement:

My work is a multimedia blend that combines painting and technology, performance and video, art and craft. It mainly consists of thematic series' of images. The starting point of these series' is Zen landscape in China and Japan between 11th and 16th century. Its main principles according to Japanese painter Sesshu Toyo are: "Ma" (tribute to the Chinese painter Ma Yuan?) - significance of the empty space/void and "Hatsuboku" - broken or splashed ink - emphases on the touch, contact between ink and paper that does not allow for rigid, lazy, descriptive strokes, but strokes and touches which show ink's natural fluidity and movement. This approach stands somewhere between drawing and painting and it certainly serves the landscape well, the genre which has completely settled in the tangible meeting point between culture and nature. In these series' I strive to create landscapes that contain both conceptual and sensual sense of place. Sensations of vast empty illuminated spaces and cultural symbolisms and social constructs of beaches and roads as places of both alienation and escapism inhabited by vagabonds.

I was born in Belgrade, in former Yugoslavia. After studies of fine arts at the University of Belgrade I relocated to Paris, France where I based my art practice from 1975 to 1985. In 1985 I immigrated to the United States. Until 1991 I was based in New York City and my art practice consisted mainly of painting and printmaking. I started experimenting with digital media, film, video and photography in 1991 when I moved to San Francisco where I lived until 2007. From 2007 to 2017 I lived and worked in Los Angeles. Today I am based in Navarre Florida working on a series of paintings titled: "Extreme Loafing & Idling."

Education:

1977 - MFA, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia
1975 - BFA, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia

Artistic Influences:

Ma Yuan, Sesshu Toyo, Antoine Watteau, Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel, Caspar David Friedrich, Joseph Mallord William Turner, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Barbizon School, Edward Hopper, Wayne Thiebaud.

Tags:

Realism, place, landscape, beach, road, ocean.