Structure of Memories

Painting Series; 2019-2022

The series Structure of Memory is based on artistic and personal reminiscence through painting as a space for processing and repositioning experiences. My painting is a form of performative action—a play with fragments of reality, memory, and imagination through layers that overlap, reveal, and erase.

Polyptych forms reflect the ambivalence of memory—its nonlinearity, rhythm, and archetypal dimension. The line that connects the parts of the polyptych is in fact a boundary between different aspects of the same experience, like the junction of collective and individual memory.

Memories in my works are not mimetic. They are energy, feeling, sediment of color. They can be archetypal, always connected to the unconscious. What remains after what has been lived through—a trace, a fragment, a defile of shadows.

2021 – Sećanja, duo exhibition with Aleksandar Todorović, City Gallery Arilje, Arilje, Serbia;
2020 – Struktura Sećanja, Block Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia;
2020 – Struktura Sećanja (Virtual Exhibition), Prodajna Galerija Beograd, Belgrade, Serbia;
2019 – Struktura Sećanja, Gallery 73, Belgrade, Serbia;
2019 – Struktura Sećanja, Gallery Boem, Cultural Centre Starčevo, Starčevo, Serbia;
2017 – Struktura Sećanja, Cultural Centre Ivanjica, Ivanjica, Serbia.

On the Paintings

Suzana Vulović’s paintings possess a powerful visual momentum. Her artistic documentation reconstructs narrative; it is a practice of creating living realities from artificial ones—of producing originals from copies, and living activity from technical processes. Art adopts the artificiality of the biopolitical order as its explicit subject, while its utopian dimension lies in the very act of defining life itself.

From one canvas to the next, one can trace the process through which lived experience is transformed into a work of art. At its core, Vulović’s practice is concerned with deconstruction. This term should not be understood as negation or destruction, but rather as an investigation of the sedimented structures that shape the discursive framework—the visual discursivity within which we think. These structures permeate language, culture, and the totality of forces that define our belonging to the world we inhabit.

What becomes evident throughout her work is the birth of an idea and its gradual realization into a coherent visual order. The logical path toward beauty is always visible—a beauty through which the artist resolves the potential for chaos. The essence of her compositions is generated by a “living force” that does not seek refuge in technical perfection, but instead pursues phenomena capable of resonating with every viewer.

Suzana does not search for an idealized world; she engages with the one that already surrounds us. Nor does she strive to introduce something entirely unprecedented. Rather, she seeks to imprint every work with the distinctiveness of her own visual language and artistic identity.

Her paintings do not overwhelm at first glance. They ask for time, attention, and contemplation. They demand to be experienced rather than merely seen. There is none of the effortless spontaneity so often mistaken for artistic freedom. One senses no desire to produce an immediate effect, but instead a commitment to discovering and fully experiencing the image before allowing it to emerge.

The disrupted equilibrium of her compositions, together with the asymmetrical relationships between ephemeral materials and painted surfaces, is ultimately resolved through a measured distribution of visual forces that restores balance among these contrasting elements. In this way, Vulović’s paintings become dynamic spatial fields charged with restless energies, provoking a subtle sense of unease before the uncertainty of what might unfold in the very next moment.

Savo Peković