The violent themes in Serbian artist Biljana Đurđević’s works reflect her development as an artist during the horror-stricken 1990s – when violence in her country peaked following the collapse of the communist regime in Eastern Europe. Đurđević belongs to the young generation of Serbian artists who experienced the political disintegration of Yugoslavia, and Serbia’s isolation under the rule of Slobodan Milošević. The body of works featured in this exhibition represents a selection from several series created by Đurđević between 1999 and 2007, in which she gazes directly into the darkest abysses of the human soul.

Đurđević’s paintings are characterized by a cruel and dramatic narrative realism, which has been termed “necrophilic realism” due to the multiplication of dead bodies and the sterile atmosphere of the public showers, operating rooms or morgues they depict. The terrifying human figures represented in these compositions offer no solace. Although they appear real, the artist insists that they do not build upon a concrete reality. The nightmarish painterly space resembles a stage, and the depicted action seems to have been frozen against a series of flat, decorative backdrops. The freezing of the scenes produces a sense of “before” or “after,” thus increasing the tension and charging the works with a dramatic quality.

Đurđević’s paintings are suffused with allusions and quotations related to the history of art, and especially to the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Christian iconography and historical paintings serve as sources from which the artist culls the charged materials for her works. In some of her paintings, one may detect themes, gestures or motifs that can be clearly identified with paintings by Ucello, Caravaggio, Da Vinci, Hals and Rembrandt. Đurđević uses the history of art in a functional and at times even cynical manner, which is due to the inverted meanings produced by her expropriation of images from their original context.

The works presented in this exhibition are characterized by emotional intensity: the tension embodied in the figures, the dizzying perspectives and the contrasts between dramatic action and decorative backdrops transform their observation into an unsettling experience. It seems that the entire brutal history of the Balkans is reflected in these images. As if submitting a dry and pragmatic post-mortem report, these paintings bespeak the politics of fear haunting a society that has experienced too many images of dead bodies.