ArtQuench Gallery Announces
Sami Gjuka The Winner
Of the “Mind,Body & Soul” Art Competition
Sami has won one year of representation with ArtQuench Gallery.
We want to Welcome Sami Gjuka to the ArtQuench family!
To view more of Sami’s work CLICK HERE.
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Winning Image titled: “Career Woman” Oil on canvas 80 x 100 cm
Juror; Monica Hicks
I chose this for several reasons: the image of the woman painted in such an impressionist way, or a subject matter that reminds me of the late 19th century, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist style in it’s emphasis on modern subjects, sketch like techniques, and pure colors. There is a hint of surrealism, perhaps the ‘mind, body, and soul’ component of the theme as the woman sits upon nothing. When I see this painting I imagine that she loses her grounding while reading the newspaper from her city, country, or around the world. She probably feels displaced and distracted, as we all do nowadays; I am not quite sure who has time or makes time to sit and read the newspaper. In this work, maybe that is the point. She cannot just sit and read the newspaper. Then I laugh. Clever piece. Nice technique.
“I’m afraid of the forest as I’m afraid of the cathedral” is the first line of Baudelaire’s poem that I quote here for the sense of fear which penetrates Sami Gjuka’s paintings.
It seems as if fear, uncertainty and presentiment are the only feelings in his paintings; sometimes transformed into an ominous feeling of emptiness and depression, into areas full of anxiety where time cannot be specified.
Objects become symbols; in their recognition, in their clearness they resist their logical function, their customary arrangement.
Sami Gjuka’s paintings are built on strong poetical imagination; here, spleen and appearance most clearly identify the character of the painting. There’s no doubt that the painter knows well the experience of the symbolists, metaphysicians and surrealists; those who formed the tradition and whose examples we know well. Exactly on that tradition Sami Gjuka “plants” his “forest of symbols”. Even though he is the heir of that experience, his presence in our surroundings is not connected to the generation of painters he belongs to. Namely, we can hardly connect him to any painting style or to the context of modern art.
Sami Gjuka’s world is one that is firmly grabbed, it cannot be connected with famous examples and every comparison is unnecessary.
There are two themes that are almost obsessive in Sami Gjuka’s paintings. The first is a strong impulse for reality, for everyday and for “obvious” while in the other, he builds on the refined structure of the picture’s surface, often with a double turn. Into the picture itself he builds a smaller picture, that gives the impression of a double metaphor. In the first picture, he transforms a clear and recognizable motif into a symbolically strong organized entirety, where the natural link between objects is conveyed into another logical order. Usually, this inversion is thought of as uncommon; clear and related parts turn into their opposites, into unclear and surreal.
However, in another cycle, the painter affects the fabric itself, its structure, in search of the ideal relation between colours. The painter’s effort is concentrated, on the structure itself, skillfully varying the composition, achieving the solutions often close to the experience of neoconstructiveness of that of minimal-art. Here we have a totally specific approach which leaves this painter with a trace of individuality enough for us to recognize all the characteristics of his own and the stylistically defined idiom.”
Milan Beslic, Art Critic
Artists statement
I work with my own metaphysical ideas painted in the way that is based on classical art style.
As a child I liked to draw like all children do. In elementary school the teacher noticed my talent and begun to direct my education to art. When I had finished my elementary education I started 5-years education at Art School, and continued at Academy of Art in Sarajevo, Brussels and Amsterdam. As a young artist I have traveled many countries In Europe, visiting museums, learning from the old masterworks.
Currently I live and work in Denmark.
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