Light Space & Time Online Art Gallery is extremely pleased to announce that Jelena Petkovic has been named as the Gallery’s new featured artist and she will now be promoted by the gallery for the next 14 days in the gallery’s Artist Showcase.

Jelena is an award-winning artist based in Paris, France. Jelena was selected as 1 of the top twelve finalists in the gallery’s 15th Solo Art Exhibition Series. The placement in this competition qualified her art to be showcased in this feature.

Jelena’s Artist Showcase feature will be promoted to over 350+ major news outlets, with inclusion on Google News & Bing News. In addition, the gallery will also be featuring and promoting her artwork in the gallery’s various social media networks for further exposure.

Below are Jelena’s Artist Biography, Artist Statement and 5 images that were submitted to this competition.

Artist Biography

Jelena Petkovic is an oil painter, born in 1990 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, currently living in Paris. She was raised by her mother and grandfather, both architects and amateur artists, so her love of drawing, painting and art in general came at a very young age. She attended her first private class of painting at age 13, preparing the entry exam for the art high school she later joined. Even though she showed talent and passion for painting, she decided to study interior design as it opened more professional opportunities in Serbia.

Throughout her studies, she naturally found painting her favorite subject and had the chance to develop her style thanks to her professor that saw her potential and gave her the freedom she needed. In the last year of university, she participated to an exhibition of student artists with an abstract self-portrait. The face stretching over the canvas was separated in different geometrical shapes symbolizing the different parts of the self. Here and in future work she focused on the human condition and on a question that drives her interest in psychology, spirituality and self-development: “Who am I?” In 2013, she obtained a bachelor’s in interior design at the faculty of Art and Design from the Megatrend University of Belgrade.

In 2015, she moved to Paris, where after two years in different jobs she decided to make her long-life love – painting, her career. She spent two years in creating a completely new collection of paintings (20 paintings in total) and just one month after finishing her last painting, she got the opportunity to present an exhibition of her work at CIEM, Paris in 2019.

The style that she developed is the base of her new work, still looking at understanding who we are but now more connected with our relationship towards one another and the state of the world. Her travels and interest in observing the human condition is always pulling her forward to new visual solutions, but always with the same goal: to illustrate the beauty of our differences, all that makes us unique, while understanding that even though we are individual we are still part of a whole.

Artist Statement

My travels have educated me, fueled my imagination and inspired me to start this series of paintings. They show various parts of the world through the portrait of a woman, a divine soul in different places, and the beauty of our differences.

I was born in 1990. Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in a time of war, inflation, international sanctions… when the image of my country around the world was one of an enemy or aggressor. Today that image has faded and there is another in its place, as horrible and as easily hated. And while our ecosystem is endangered and people are still hungry, while species of animals become extinct every day, we still look for the enemy. Whoever comes next, we cannot judge others by their origin. More than ever, we need peace and harmony, tolerance and mutual respect. This is the reason why I decided to paint the best of every country, culture, religion, looking at it with admiration. It is our differences that make this planet and the humankind beautiful; it is different colors that make a painting colorful. Then, in the middle of it all, there is a human – a portrait of a woman. It is showing us that in the country where we are born, we are raised with certain values and traditions, but even though we have different costumes and backgrounds, we are the same. We are human, with all that makes us human, and we all want the same things in our lives. We all want love, peace and happiness and we all fight for it, so why can’t we stop fighting and just go to this destination together in harmony?

When I start a painting, what pulls me toward a certain ethnic group is a life story, or some part of the History, and as well the aesthetics, the forms and most of all the colors. I like to dive in the culture through all its components. My research includes the landscapes, traditions, rituals, legends, plants, animals, people, costumes, jewelry... the more I have information, the more I feel like a part of it.

The painting processes itself starts with the model, the woman; it is always a woman. Why? Besides my preference for drawing and painting women’s bodies and faces, in this collection I chose to work with a woman’s energy because it represents gentleness, kindness, tolerance, which is exactly what I’m talking about - what we need in the world. In Hinduism, it is believed, and it is one of my beliefs as well, that we hold energy of both woman and man and that our world used to need more man’s energy for survival. Now that we need to go beyond survival, we need more woman’s energy. After drawing a model, I draw lines separating different spaces both in the face and in the background. These lines bring the geometry of my portraits and the separate parts define and represent the different character traits in the individual, our uniqueness.

The last important part of my creation is the choice of the dominant colors of the painting. The colors are a big part of my work; they give me the inspiration through the process of creation. To keep the intensity of the colors I apply oil paint directly from the tube on the canvas, without mixing them previously, which gives them brightness, keeps the raw energy of the color, and give a positive feel to my paintings, a higher vibration. The colors carry me through the creation, and give soul to the paintings.

Through these portraits I want to show how beautifully unique we all are, and how in the same time we all are pieces of the same unity.

Jelena’s website is www.petkovicart.com.