Maja Vukoje

Maja Vukoje’s work interweaves topics related to our globalized world with current discourses in painting. For this exhibition—her most comprehensive solo show to date—the artist has created a site-specific installation at the Belvedere 21 pavilion.

Maja Vukoje’s paintings are visual tricks of exquisite beauty and intellectual acuity. They are colorful, beguiling, sometimes bewildering, occasionally made of sugar or coffee. They quote things we know from our everyday lives or from the art museum. They challenge our perception but also our attitudes. Above all, Maja Vukoje’s paintings reveal her virtuosity as a painter who reflects on and experimentally probes the possibilities of what a painting can be today.

The artist combines acrylic with products that are alien to painting on coarsely woven, unprimed burlap. Sometimes she uses bleach, thereby reversing the usual painting process by removing pigment rather than adding it. This blurring of boundaries in the media of painting is echoed in her subject matter, which she draws from different temporal, cultural, and aesthetic contexts. The interrelationship between form and content is just as essential as the concepts of hybridity and transculturality, the mingling and merging of elements from various cultures. In her exhibition, tropical fruit and other commodities with colonial traces are juxtaposed to symbols of our digitized everyday lives and the surveillance of our bodies, while themes from popular culture come face to face with iconic works from art history. She takes images thus cited and reassembles and retranslates them, placing them in new substantive contexts.

Featuring over 100 works, Belvedere 21 presents the most comprehensive insight into the artist’s oeuvre to date. The hanging is not arranged by chronology or theme but makes associations by interweaving bodies of work from the last decade with her most recent art. Maja Vukoje has also engaged with the architecture of the Schwanzer Pavilion in a site-specific installation that plays with light and shadow, color and materiality.

Maja Vukoje was born in Düsseldorf in 1969, grew up in Belgrade and has lived in Vienna since 1988. She studied painting with Maria Lassnig and Christian Ludwig Attersee at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Since the 1990s, her works have been recognized with numerous stipends and prizes including: Österreichisches Staatsstipendium für bildende Kunst (1999), Prize for young European painters, Premio del Golfo, La Spezia (2000), Georg Eisler-Preis der Bank Austria Creditanstalt (2004), outstanding artist award (2015), International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) New York (sponsored by the Austrian Federal Chancellery; 2019), Preis der Stadt Wien für bildende Kunst (2020). She has been on the board of the Vienna Secession since 2013.

Curated by Luisa Ziaja.

Press contact: Désirée Schellerer / presse [​at​] belvedere.at / T +43 1 79 557-303

View press materials here.