“Word and (or) Image, Ethics and (l) Aesthetics” by Irena Vuković – an artist from Podgorica. The exhibition consists of digital drawings printed on canvas, realized in the last five years.
Irena Vuković was born in 1975 in Titograd. She graduated from the Department of Graphic Design at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cetinje, in the class of Professor Mile Grozdanić. She received her master’s degree in 2020 from the same faculty with the thesis “Graphic Design of the Edition or the Artistic Autonomy of the Book”. Since 2014, she has been working as a professor at the Secondary Art School “Petar Lubarda” in Cetinje. She has exhibited solo in Podgorica, Tivat, Herceg Novi, Pančevo, Vranje, Belgrade, Bijelo Polje. She has participated in numerous collective exhibitions, art and creative workshops in the country and abroad. She has been a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Montenegro since 2005. She won the “Good Design” award at the Novi Sad Book Salon (2008) for the graphic design of the “Nobel Prize” edition.
With an interdisciplinary approach, combining the experience of graphic design with painting and drawing, and applying modern technology in its implementation, Irena Vuković develops an indigenous opus based on original visual art and visuality that synthesizes text and image.
Personally, active reflection on contemporary social relations and circumstances opens up a wide range of psychological, ethical, and ultimately existential themes for Irena Vuković, which the artist interprets with a pronounced dose of humor, often with a bitter undertone. Supporting the form of comics, Irena mainly defines scenes in the form of dialogues between figures, often presented on a geometric background that is reminiscent of pixels of electronic images or graphics of old video games. Her figures are expressively caricatured in character with intense yet harmonious colors, and the texts they “pronounce” are either witty wordplay or verses whose form refers to traditional folk literature, while the content reflects contemporary vocabulary and situations.
Irena Vuković is the author of a special mental and emotional code and clear perceptions of the circumstances of her own time. Her works, as inspired visual testimonies of the “new normality” we live in and current models of behavior, provoke reflection on the perspective of living in conditions of shaken humanistic principles.
The exhibition will run until June 23.