Exposition Art Blog: Olja Ivanjicki

Olja Ivanjicki

Olja (Olga) Ivanjicki (1931-2009) was a well-known Serbian contemporary artist, in fields such as sculpture, poetry, costume design, architecture and writing, but was best known for her painting. She had no fewer than 87 individual exhibitions at home and abroad.





 Olja Ivanjicki, renowned Yugoslav avant-garde painter, talks warmly about her father who starved to give a true home to a lonely little girl whose mother died when she was four. This included lot of reading.
Olja Ivanjicki's parents came to Yugoslavia from Russia in the twenties. Olja was born in Pancevo, near Belgrade, and spent her childhood in Kragujevac, Republic of Serbia, where her father was an engineer in the Military Technical Institute.
After World War II, Vasilije Ivanjicki and his daughter moved to Belgrade, where he taught ballistics at the Military Academy for two years until he retired.







Today, when she is one of the top Yugoslav painters, Olja has time to read only one author-Dostoyevsky, "Why waste time reading two hundred pages for a single memorable sentence? With Dostoyevsky, every sentence is a book", says Olja who has little time left for anything except painting.
Nevertheless, extravagant Olja is at the center of attention at all important functions or private parties in Belgrade. Her elfin face seems to fit perfectly in her pictures, in which figures of women resembling Madonna's are almost always present. Her paintings in which imagination and reality mingle and melt together reflect her way of thinking and expressing herself.(web.mit.edu)






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