Zoran Gavric

There’s a palpable sense of grief, but also exquisite mystery and intrigue, to be found in the large-scale oil paintings of Zoran Gavric. Now based in Germany, but born in the former Yugoslavia, he cites the experience of growing up in a communist country and living through its unraveling as a crucial factor in his artistic development. Indeed, imagery of fractures, emotional injury and disjuncture pervade all his compositions, which feature stylized human faces and figures against weathered, monochrome backdrops.

His subjects’ bodies are often truncated by abstract fields of color, evoking the notion of people who are cut off from essential parts of themselves. Elsewhere, characters’ faces suggest trauma and sorrow, emotions that Gavric’s increasingly frantic, expressionistic brush strokes reinforce and amplify. However, the paintings are never so bleak that they become completely depressive. Rather, they create moods of contemplation and self-expression that resonate universally with all legacies of suffering and loss. Articulating his personal hardships through the elegant, muted tones of each enigmatic painting, Gavric crafts therapeutic vessels for self-reflection.