Maja Vukoje

Studio d’Arte Cannaviello/Biagiotti Arte Contemporanea, Milan/Florence
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A preferred subject for many artists, the doll is not generally used to communicate a serene or innocent vision symbolizing an idealized childhood; on the contrary, it is often loaded with disturbing significance that relates to profound existential experiences or specters of the unconscious.

It is enough to think of the transgressive erotic charge of the extraordinary Poupée, an anatomically traumatized doll constructed in the ’30s by the surrealist Hans Bellmer, who used it in a series of intensely fascinating photographs—an idea later picked up and reelaborated in even more spectacular form in Cindy Sherman’s gigantic images. One could also refer to the works of American artist Kim Dingle, loaded with a destructive energy, or to the depressed and distressed protagonists of some of Tony Oursler’s installations.

Maja Vukoje is a Serbian artist living in Vienna, and her dolls, painted in oil on canvas, are similarly impregnated with a strong existential charge that is closely connected to her life experience. In many respects the works may be considered indirect self-portraits, but they also possess a general emblematic value that correlates with the more tragic aspects of the human condition. Although Vukoje created her first series of dolls in 1995, it was only in 1999 that she began to concentrate exclusively on this theme. With the passage of time, her subject has undergone a technical and formal evolution in which she has achieved a refined quality and a disorienting, often shocking expressivity.

From the pictorial point of view, the most striking thing about Vukoje’s dolls is the successful contrast between the fluctuating and transparent lightness of the bodies—though their volumes are clearly defined—and the intense hyperreal fixedness of the eyes, a blue whose color is both cold and vitreous. They are eyes that, while reflecting a vital force, do not actually look outward—they seem instead to be mirrors reflecting a mysterious inwardness that is significantly disturbed by a sense of emptiness. Technically the artist has succeeded in finding an effective equilibrium between a vision of the photographic matrix—in cropping and framing, in the close-up faces that come into sharp focus, and in a particular cleanness—and a pictorial tension of an expressionistic value that shares certain similarities with the liquid images of Marlene Dumas.




Francesco Poli
Translation by Amanda Coulson