Jelena Perić
Yellow Square, 1993
oil on canvas
150 x 150 cm
MG-6384
Jelena Perić (1962) was born in St. Petersburg. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1984, in the class of Š. Perić. From 1984 to 1986, she was an associate in the Lj. Ivančić’s and N. Reiser’s Master’s Workshop. She had her first solo exhibition in 1988 in the Student Centre Gallery. Generally speaking, we associate Jelena Perić’s painting and ambient painterly installations with the new geometric abstraction of minimalist portent and cognitive concept established within monochrome paintings, as well as their sequences in which the artist appropriates the exhibition space as an equal part of the painting. Jelena Perić’s visual compositions are based on the tradition of monochrome painting (K. Malevich, A. Rodchenko, Y. Klein, M. Rothko, B. Newman, A. Reindhardt…), but they are independent realizations of mental, spiritual and emotional qualities that behave as energy nodes in space (J. Perić). Geometry is rational; contemplative stimulation of the observer is spiritual, and the emotion springs from the psychology of looking, that is, the optical effects of colour in its glowing, dynamic (warm colour, Red Square, 1992), or absorbing property (cold colour, Dark Green Square, 1992). In that sense colour is light, and light is both a wave and a particle. The Yellow Painting (1993) is one such monochrome square within the white border, the power of which affects the observer by radiating colour within minimal, monochrome determinants, in an emotional, spiritual, intellectual and psychological way. The conceptual reliance on predecessors is relative since ideas are no one’s property, they move from spirit to spirit (J. Perić). From 1998 until today, she has staged and participated in many solo and group exhibitions, and her works are kept in museums, galleries and private collections.
Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb