Nevena Prijic “Feral Currents”

Mrs.

[Image: Nevena Prijic "Lucent Nudes" (2023) Acrylic and Flashe on Canvas, 72 x 45 in. Photograph by Ruben Diaz]

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Mrs. presents Feral Currents, Serbian painter Nevena Prijic’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Across nine canvases, Prijic describes bold, swirling anti-forms which burst with the energy of the cosmos, reaching toward us, declaring a new way of life.

In Feral Currents, the viewer is dropped into a world full of seemingly defined indefinites. Color carries us there. Matte, solid backgrounds serve as stages, presenting confident, reticulated forms. Like an x-ray, everything is visible all at once. Prijic carefully pulls back the curtain on chaotic layers of heavenly bodies, which would otherwise be covered with opaque skins. Slashes and splashes of wild, frenetic underpainting are reigned in by hand-labored lines of sinewed musculature. The articulated forms are moving and intertwined, as all living beings, braiding themselves together to create one unified and universal being.

With bold strokes of flashe, the world folds in on itself. The edge of a spoon transmutes into the edge of a bone. The microscopic world vibrates into the macro. In the unity of all things, their hierarchy becomes arbitrary. Italo Calvino writes, “…Everything can be transformed into something else, and knowledge of the world means dissolving the solidity of the world…there is an essential parity between everything that exists, as opposed to any sort of hierarchy of powers or values.” It is through this lens that Prijic’s works find themselves.

Like fantastical cloud formations, it’s easy to project upon the painted shapes that fill our field of vision: party streamers and unwelcome neighbors, grinch-like toes creeping across the surface while a young tornado peeks in the front door. Spindly elbows and bulbous protrusions drag and lift one another across the sky/floor. These energetic forms stay within reach, threatening to escape the picture plane but always restrained enough to be examined, like gorillas behind a window.

The beautiful thing about painting is that every projection we make onto it is true. We do have a record of all these alternate dimensions, infinite moments stacked on top of each other, which we have access to all at once. The paintings are fresh. Their meaning and making is the same, every moment is happening concurrently - the dripping, spraying, drying, masking, smearing. The dividing, glitching, freedom of being. The evolutions. Prijic’s paintings mirror the cosmos as fireflies mirror the stars; with hope, longing and pure joy.

-Emily Janowick

Nevena Prijic earned her BFA and MFA in Painting from The University of Novi Sad, Academy of Fine Arts, Serbia. Prijic immigrated to the United States in 2017. Her work has recently been exhibited at Hesse Flatow, New York, NY; The Hole, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA; Bozomag and M+B, Los Angeles, CA and Public Gallery, London, UK. Prijic lives and works in Los Angeles and has been represented by M+B since 2023.