smisidora97@gmail.com
I S I D O R A S I M I Ć
Through visual art, I depict abstractions of human emotions. Can humanity (what defines a person) be determined solely by visualizing complex emotions? I seek to answer this question through paintings and other works using contemporary media. These works are part of the collective experience, yet when exhibited, they offer individuals the intimacy of contact.
Isidora Simić (b. 1997, Belgrade) graduated in fashion design from the College of Vocational Studies, Belgrade Polytechnic in 2020, with her final thesis on The Influence of Architecture on Fashion Design. In 2019, she enrolled in the Faculty of Contemporary Arts in Belgrade, in the Visual Arts Department, Painting, under the mentorship of Professor Đorđe Stanojević, from which she graduated in 2023 and finished msters degree in 2024. During her studies, she volunteered as a teaching assistant in the subject of anatomical drawing, later becoming a teaching associate for the subjects of drawing and painting. She currently lives and actively creates in Belgrade, where she also teaches as a lecturer at the Faculty of contemporary art and ITS College. Her approach is multimedia and includes painting, digital art, video, performance, sculpture, and sound. She is the founder of Venture Art, an association dedicated to projects in the field of culture and art.
E g e o f F e a r
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Mapping out the Comfort Zone
The series of paintings Edge of Fear: Mapping out the Comfort Zone represents emotions formed at the boundary between fear and a sense of security. Fear and security are two distinctly delineated emotional fields that shape our everyday lives. Security provides a ground where love, contentment, and calmness move freely. In this territory, a person finds space for growth, creativity, and peace. In contrast, fear gives rise to hatred, envy, and other negative emotions. Fear paralyzes, trapping us within our own minds and bodies. Unable to step beyond our known boundaries to explore the unknown, dissatisfaction builds up and eventually turns into pain.
This series offers an abstract portrayal of the complexity of human emotions that emerge when confronting oneself after a long period of avoidance. It expresses an emotion struggling to break free. At the edge of the comfort zone, a collision of different feelings takes place. These paintings capture that moment when the sense of security begins to fade, and fear becomes increasingly present. It raises the question: what lies beyond?
Inertia, Treshold, Friction - oil and spray on canvas, 160 x 140, 2024.
Longing, Equilibrium, Veil - oil and spray on canvas, 160 x 140, 2024.
Dissonance, Collision, Sanctuary - oil and spray on canvas, 160 x 140, 2024.
Unvailing, Shatter I, II - oil and spray on canvas, 210 x 185, 70 x 40, 2024.
m u s c u l u s d i s c e r p t i o
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m u s c l e t e a r i n g
In the series of works Muscle Tearing, I use my own body as a tool, questioning its potential—its boundaries of pain, pleasure, and sensations through movement. This opus offers an insight into human intimacy. I search for the breaking point of the tissue, the moment of spiritual fragility that reveals bare humanity and emotion. It is uncovered through the movements and positions I explore by straining my body. With body and brush, I weave full emotion into the canvas of the painting. The creation process is uncompromising, serving the being to express itself, while performative movement and painting go hand in hand.
My interest in the intimate evolves into a fascination with human nature and its impulses. The impulses that draw a person alternately towards chaos and order are portrayed through the fusion of compositional symmetry and asymmetry, tactile rawness and softness, control and the expressiveness of strokes. This dichotomy mimics the depth and complexity of human experience, the nuances of physical and psychological reality.
Over time, red has found my unique shade. It is handmade. Shaped by the labor of female hands, infused with passion and the vitality of movement, it has gained life, while its tactile quality evokes sensation and emotion. Red is energy, emotion, and vitality. It represents pain as a sign of life itself.
Latissimus dorsi I, II, III - oil on canvas, 150 x 100, 2023.
Saeptum I, II, Linea alba I - oil on canvas, 150 x 100, 2023.
Sartoris I, II, III - oil on canvas, 150 x 100, 2023.
Myocardium I, II - oil on canvas, 150 x 100, 2023.
Pectoralis I, II, III - oil on canvas, 150 x 100, 2023.
Musculus discerptio - video work, 18 minutes, 2023.
u l t r a c a r n e m
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b e y o n d t h e f l e s h
Observing Isidora's works, we don't feel like voyeurs; we feel like guests, welcomed onto the terrain to which we belong. Sometimes the scene is familiar, like déjà vu, sometimes it's nostalgia for places we haven't been, and sometimes it's grief for lives we haven't lived. The experience is undoubtedly universal. Drawing inspiration from personal history, Isidora Simić's art effortlessly becomes universally understandable. The themes that occupy her can broadly be classified under the exploration of corporeality, its demands, limits, and paradoxes. The artist questions what it means to inhabit a body, to keep it vital despite the challenges it faces, to resist its urges, and ultimately, to pay its impositions.
Through her work, she strives to expose the narratives in which bodies are discursively embedded, tracing the trajectory of concrete matter through abstract, often contradictory contexts. She utilizes her own experiences, whether through the creation of symbolic monuments or directly, to tell stories as old as time but forgotten at first opportunity. In a world filled with people who experience validation only through absolute exposure, intimacy is a rare and expensive currency.
With this series of works, Isidora Simić shows an unwavering readiness to violate the social contract through her nudity and vulnerability. She offers us an unadorned face in close-up, words of poetry born in moments of genuine personal suffering spoken through recordings of her body in an erased space, in a non-place. She presents her severed hair on a bloody pillow, her fears of life and oblivion in death masks. Engaging in an uncensored dialogue with her own self, the artist transforms a whole spectrum of powerful emotions into an elegant, condensed form that does not lose its value through aestheticization. On the contrary, she restores beauty to states marked as undesirable with a red letter. To be human means to suffer, to seek meaning in transience, to locate oneself in the chaos of a universe that does not hear our objections. We are victims and executioners, trapped in a closed cycle of guilt and the impossibility of repentance. We live in what can aptly be described as the Kali Yuga, and only Krishna had the fortune to be rid of his body. Ours, which killed God to take his place, awaits the eternity of Christian hell, the endless desert of the universe, or the final answer to what lies beyond the body.
Milica Grujić, art historian and curator
Larvis - sculptures, oil on fabric, glass, wire, R26 each 2022.
Corpus I - instalation, oil on fabric, metal, acrylic filling, 180 x 80, 2022.
Nox - instalation, oil on fabric, acrylic filling, 50 x 70, 2022.
Dies - instalation, oil on fabric, 50 x 70, 2022.
Capitibus - sculptures, oil on fabric, glass, 27 x 22, 16 x 11, 2022.
Duo - oil on canvas, 160 x 10, 2022.
Tres - dyptich, oil on canvas, 150 x 140, 2022.
Pupilla I, II - oil on canvas, 70 x 40, 2022.
Corpus II - instalation, hair and oil on fabric, 2022.
Absinthium - video work, 3 minutes, 2022.
Bustum - video work, 3 minutes, 2022.
Nulla post unum - video work, 1 minute, 2022.
c o r p o r i s p r e s s u r a
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b o d y p r e s s u r e
Blood pressure is a symbol of human vitality and inner fire. It also represents a measure of tension and stress. The process of applying color to paper is carried out without the use of a brush; instead, it is applied by pressing parts of the body, allowing the pure white surface to absorb the entirety of the emotion, whether it be strong, intense, and destructive, or sensitive and gentle. Through this method, the body leaves its individual trace, containing the most delicate emotions, feelings of pain, passion, and tension. The shades of red, characteristic as a symbol of liveliness, energy, and vitality, acquire a dimension that alludes to the life force flowing through the human being. These works represent an intimate expression of duality that lies at the heart of our existence - life and death, passion and pain, light and darkness. Within them, strength and vulnerability are concealed, simultaneously revealing the internal struggles that shape us as human beings.
Isidora Simić
Fortis, Inaequele, Infirma - aquarelle on paper, 32 x 35 each, 2023.
b o d y d r a w i n g s
When drawn, the body becomes a vulnerable canvas, revealing the rawness of human intimacy. Every curve, every contour tells a story of exposed emotions and stripped-down authenticity, capturing the essence of being bare, not only physically but also emotionally, as the strokes unveil the layers of vulnerability that hide beneath societal masks.
Isidora Simić
Education
2024. - MA in visual arts, Faculty of contemporary art, Belgrade
2023. - BA in visual arts, Faculty of contemporary art, Belgrade
2020. - BA in fashion design, Belgrade Polytechinc, Belgrade
2016. - Lazarevac High School, majoring in natural mathematics, Lazarevac
Solo exhibitions
2021 - Animalia: Insecta - Gallery of the Faculty of Contemporary Arts - Belgrade, Serbia
2021 - Performance: I'm Listening to You - Museum of Saints - Belgrade, Serbia
2022 - Triptych - Modern gallery of the cultural center Gornji Milanovac - Gornji Milanovac, Serbia
2022 - Ultra Carnem - Cultural Center Dorćol - Belgrade, Serbia
2023 - Corporis pressura / Body pressure - University Library Art Center - Belgrade, Serbia
2024 - Musculus discerptio / Muscle tearing - Fsu Gallery, Belgrade, Serbia
2024 - Love and Gutter - Cultural center of Sabac, Sabac, Serbia
Group exibitions
2022 - Start - University Library - Belgrade, Serbia
2022 - Exhibition of digital graphics, group exhibition, Maglian campus, Divcibare
2022 - Sound sculptures - Gallery of the Faculty of Contemporary Arts - Belgrade, Serbia
2022. - Digital Nomadism - Institute for the Study of Cultural Development - Belgrade, Serbia
2022 - Process - Silos - Belgrade, Serbia
2022 - December Art Salon - Lazarevac Modern Gallery - Lazarevac, Serbia
2023 - Start - University Library - Belgrade, Serbia
2023 - December Art Salon - Lazarevac Modern Gallery - Lazarevac, Serbia
2023 - Digital multimedia: display and perception - Fsu Gallery - Belgrade, Serbia
2024 - Interactions and Transformations: Life in the Digital Age - Fsu Gallery - Belgrade, Serbia
Courses
2022 - NLP profesional , PCI Institute
Projects and collaborations
2024 - In/Sight - Creator of publication for Venture Art association, Belgrade, Serbia
2023 - Author of the artist's book Bis septem plus uno, Belgrade, Serbia
2023 - Video director and performer at Studio C47, Belgrade
2022 - Curation of the Comic Exhibition in Paris at the Center for the Study of Cultural Development, Belgrade
2019 - Associate at Belgrade Fashion week , Belgrade
2019 - Associate at BAF , Belgrade
Scholarships
2023 - Scholarship of Faculty of contemporary art - Belgrade, Serbia
Residences/colonies
2022 – Nature and art – Osečina, Srbija
2023 – Nature and art – Osečina, Srbija
Work
2021 - 2022 - Teaching demonstrator, Anatomy, Faculty of Contemporary Arts, Belgrade
2022 - 2023 - Associate at teaching at Faculty of contemporary Art, Belgrade
2023 - Lecturer at FSU and ITS, Belgrade