Trepča by Ljiljana Šunjevarić.
Ljiljana Šunjevarić’s latest artistic ensemble will be exhibited for the first time in Niš, at the Pavilion in Tvrđava from August 22 to September 15. With these paintings, the artist remains consistent with issues of social reality, but makes perhaps the first more extensive contribution to understanding the living conditions in northern Kosovo in domestic art. The Trepča Mining Complex, which symbolizes the betrayed ideas of socialist workers’ progress, indirectly tells us about the policy of restoring Serbia’s sovereignty over the province, from the late 1980s and the more than excessive epilogue from the 1990s. However, Ljiljana’s paintings mostly thematize the twenty-year transitional vacuum in this territory, the issues of people’s lives and endless expectations. Therefore, the artist paints vedutes of this complex in a hilly landscape, genre scenes from the Trepča restaurant, and portraits of the staff and its guests in muted tones. With the Trepča exhibition, Ljiljana Šunjevarić makes precise but open artistic observations and thus provokes a response from the public consciousness.
Ljiljana Šunjevarić was born in 1979 in Užice. She graduated, received her master’s and doctorate in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Arts in Belgrade. She has been actively exhibiting at solo and group exhibitions in the country and abroad since 2000. She has been awarded in the field of drawing. She is the author of several art projects in public space. She has participated in numerous domestic and international art colonies and workshops. Her works of art are represented in many collections: Collection of Paintings / Period after 1950 of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade; Collection of Contemporary Art of the Nadežda Petrović Gallery in Čačak; Collection of the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zrenjanin; Collection of the National Museum in Arandjelovac; Collection of the National Museum in Smederevo; Collection of the City Museum of Belgrade; Collection of the National Museum in Kraljevo; Collection of Contemporary Painting of the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts in Niš and in several private collections. She is employed at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pristina with a temporary seat in Kosovska Mitrovica, with the title of Associate Professor.