The Grand Painting Exhibition with a Pile of Paintings

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JELENA MIJIĆ
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THE GRAND
I
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PAINTING EXHIBITION
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WITH A PILE OF PAINTINGS
OR
II
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Specijalni paket iz Njujorka
(HOW NEW YORK BROUGHT ME BACK TO PAINTING)
III
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Potpisan katalog 57. Oktobarskog salona
REMONT GALLERY 5.-24.11.2018.

On the occasion of the Grand painting exhibition
of Jelena Mijić, with a pile of paintings
A city is text. Every text survives thanks to repetition
of stereotypes and their breaking, to trivialities
and their avoiding. By writing a short footnote to
this city, I’m just stamping the words spoken countless
times. Of course, it’s not me that is important,
it’s the footnote.
(Dubravka Ugrešić, Fox)
““Really,” – Dubravka Ugrešić wonders at the beginning of her latest novel
Fox – “How are stories conceived?” Many writers would welcome such
a question as a cue for a diatribe of their unfathomable creative endeavour,
and for that reason people respect such writers. But some others,
Ugrešić writes, “prefer to shrug their shoulders and allow the readers to
believe that stories grow like weed...” When it comes to exhibitions of
paintings, such an assumption is quite conventional – exhibitions exist
because paintings are, simply, already there, they have somehow grown,
sprung up. After all, one assumes that the production precedes the consumption,
that without the production of art, there is no consumption,
for without art production, you are the roots without a gourd, you are
the meme of a conceptual artist whom a famous comic hero slaps, trying
to get through her head that she is conceptual precisely because she can
neither draw nor paint. But the exhibition in front of us is turning things
and claims that the only way to be “conceptual” in art today is to draw and
paint many pictures, piles and heaps of them.
The grand painting exhibition with a pile of paintings, inasmuch as every
artistic act along the line of administrative conceptualism, was conceived

on the basis of the confrontation of several artistic assumptions and propositions
with actual conditions and circumstances of production and distribution.
First and foremost, the artist was under institutional-professional-moral
obligation to prepare an exhibition at Belgrade’s Remont
Gallery because this was expected in the competition regulations for the
Mangelos Prize she received a year ago and thanks to which she went to a
residency in New York City, USA. Like every dedicated artist, art lover, curator,
art historian or someone of that sort, Jelena Mijić (hereinafter “Jela”
or “the artist”) had spent most of her time in NY visiting exhibitions, galleries,
museums; walking the streets; riding on subway; attending openings
of exhibitions in the galleries she visited, drinking white wines and
standing with the glass in front of the works whilst chatting about art
with many, mostly friendly persons she encountered. Whilst engaged in
these activities, she finally realized that in most of these galleries and museums,
she was mostly attending and observing exhibitions of paintings.
And so, empirically again, she concluded that it seemed, now and after
all, that the current present of art, of contemporary art, had somehow
turned out to be – painterly.
After Jela’s return to Belgrade, everything turned out to be quite logical.
The exhibition needed to be organised, if for no other reason, then because
of the responsibility to the expectations of the jury that had had
the confidence to award a young painter, although she, by her own admission,
had not painted since the third year of her studies at the art
academy. Jela was awarded for her “conceptual” works, although they,
too, were mostly paintings of sorts– yet not to the full extent to which this
“real paintings” exhibition which is now in front of us. The citation for
the award was the following: “Jelena Mijić was awarded for a work that
demonstrates an open and experimental approach to researching and
understanding the complex relationships on which art production and
its social perception are based.” In New York, this largest centre of the
decentralized world, it turned out that art production implies primarily
the production of paintings, because this is simply “good for the economy”:
paints, canvases, brushes are produced and spent, more and more of
them, better and better, and the social perception of this production goes
on with the help of a glass of wine and canapés, also produced with the

help of those perform temporary and occasional jobs. And, in the end,
there is something to sell and buy. Win-win art.
So, the artist really took this lesson seriously and fell to work vigorously.
She took the money received with the prize and, like a “true painter”,
bought various paints: high-quality acrylics, oils – mostly Daler-Rowney,
of which she mainly used raw and baked umbra (for she studied at the
Belgrade Academy, after all), but also Naples yellow, titanium white,
many different blues, but most often blue-gray (the favourite colour of
the author of these lines, which attracted him to these paintings), and
she also used oil paint in Winsor & Newton sticks and acrylic in Liquitex
Professional spray. She bought, of course, all kinds of brushes of various
manufacturers. She bought canvases – fortunately the smaller ones already
stretched – and, in a little less than a month, she painted 33 paintings,
at least so far. She first claimed that she had painted 35 of them, and
we don’t know what has happened with the missing two, although the
artist says she has simply counted them incorrectly.
The organization of the production process looked roughly like this: first,
without even knowing that some real paintings would arise from it, she
took photographs of the city she was visiting – a view of the Brooklyn
Bridge, a view from below at high buildings, a view from above from high
buildings, a glimpse through a wired fence of something that is enclosed
by the wire fence, a portrait of an unknown girl on a subway train, and
afterwards of some other people on the subway, a self-portrait with a facial
cosmetic mask, white clouds and a beach on Coney Island, a fairly
smashed car, a detail on the facade of a building, a detail of the canopy
of a ginkgo tree, then one serious gallery-talk, an umbrella that flew into
the wind, some luggage unloaded on the street, a selfie in the mirror, and
again some paintings in a gallery, and some more paintings in a gallery,
and a man in a gallery watching the paintings, and many other things
that could be expected as a nice remembrance of a journey like this.
These photographs have thus become mechanically produced raw materials,
and then came processing of this raw material by means of technical-manual
processing, i.e., with the help of a computer programme
designed for this kind of image manipulation. This kind of processing

activity resulted in the sketches for paintings. And the paintings, that final
product, really are paintings, the “real” ones, hand-painted in a room
in her flat, adapted for that purpose. For a painter who had not painted
since the third year of her studies, and I hope that local art critics would
agree, these are rather good paintings! Moreover, it seems that the fact
that the artist had not been engaged in painting, and that she forgot a
little of what she had been taught about the way to do it, only improved
her painterly métier.
In the end, let’s try to sum up. Although much could already be learned
about this in the past hundred years, artists, here and now, in their works
more often still choose either expression or symbolization and, unfortunately,
often both at the same time: the first through the second or the
second through the first. And in both keys, Jela’s paintings are, simply, inadequate.
In contrast, what is common to both Jela’s “conceptual” works
and now these “real” paintings is, above all, the formalization process.
Why and under what circumstances does an artistic process acquire a
certain form defined by the production conditions, circumstances and
requirements? How does an image translate from its technical into its
manual form? What is gained and what is lost in this translation? How do
some filled cracks in the asphalt, or shadows that some other exhibited
paintings make on the gallery walls – that is, everything that is found in
a photograph by its unavoidable presence – how does it then turn into a
painting stroke by this simple translation in which the surplus is not left
out but transformed into some kind of painterly noise, materialized by
a brush stroke, first the computer brush, and then the “real” one? Thus,
these images are at the same time analyses of an operational procedure in
the production of painting, and an iconological analysis of the material
traces that are transformed from one type of image into another, from
one reproduction of the scene into a reproduction of the reproduction of
the same scene. In this way, painting, as a production process, is always
and at the same time both a practical and contemplative activity, that is,
a practical contemplation of the relationship between the seen and the
constructed. The active and the contemplative, as the iconologist Erwin
Panofsky once concluded, jointly “interpenetrate” in what we understand
and construct as reality: “The man who is run over by an automobile is

un over by mathematics, physics and chemistry. For he who leads the
contemplative life cannot help influencing the active, just as he cannot
prevent the active life from influencing his thought.” Painting therefore
does not have to be an obstacle to art-thinking.
Branislav Dimitrijević

Painting is like travelling, you have the
time to really think about everything
acryllic on Ikea blind “Tupplur”
180x135 cm
Squares
acryllic on Ikea blind “Tupplur”
two-sided painting
100x130 cm
Water
acryllic on Ikea blind “Tupplur”
two-sided painting
100x130 cm
On the road to MOMA
oil on canvas
80x100 cm
Fallen gingko leaves in front of the
second appartment we lived in
oil and acryllic on canvas
80x100 cm

Broken umbrella, on the way to the Queens
museum, my favorite museum in NYC.
oil on canvas
60x70 cm
Metro station abstraction
oil on canvas
60x70 cm
A guard is eating an apple at an opening of
a Richard Serra exhibition in a fancy gallery
in Chelsea
oil on canvas
70x60 cm
Central park view from the terrace of the
Metropolitan Museum
oil on canvas
60x50 cm
Coney Island
oil and acryllic on canvas
50x60 cm
October 16th
oil on canvas
50x60 cm

A sports court abstraction
oil on canvas
50x60 cm
Carton twin towers
oil on canvas
50x60 cm
Street scene on Manhattan
oil on canvas
50x60 cm
Luka on Broadway station looking at a
polaroid he just made
oil on canvas
40x50 cm
A visitor at an opening in Chelsea
oil on canvas
40x50 cm

Antique sculpture at the Metropoliten Museum
oil on canvas
40x50 cm
Luka at MOMA PS1
oil on canvas
40x50 cm
At the Laura Owens exhibition in Whitney
Museum
oil on canvas
40x50 cm
Accident on Broadway
oil on canvas
25x35 cm
Artist Linnea Vedder at the opening of her
exhibition at the Lubov gallery in Chinatown
oil on canvas
25x35 cm

The second day
oil on canvas
25x35 cm
A little drink at an exhibition opening in the
Lower East Side
oil on canvas
25x35 cm
Manhattan
oil on canvas
25x35 cm
A view from the platform at the first floor of
MOMA at the exhibiton of Louise Bourgeois
oil on canvas
25x35 cm
Selfportrait with a face-mask that was being
handed out on the street in Chinatown
oil on canvas
25x35 cm

A break
oil and acryllic on canvas
10x15 cm
October 18th
oil and acryllic on canvas
10x15 cm
Taking a photo of the Statue of liberty
during the golden hour
acryllic on canvas
10x15 cm
Sky over Brooklyn
oil and acryllic on canvas
10x15 cm
When I think about New York, I think about
the people on the subway
acryllic on canvas
10x15 cm

nyc2017bgd2018