Maja Marković

Born in Zagreb in 1979.

After graduating from the Department of Painting at the School of Applied Arts and Design, in 1999 Maja enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb where she is a graduate student in the painting faculty's teaching department, in the class of Prof. Ante Rašić.
In 2005/2006 she studied 3 months at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, Department of Design, in the class of Prof. I. Paik.
Maja is a member of the Croatian Association of Artists and Croatian Freelance Artists' Association.
Her works have been shown at solo and group exhibitions. In 2007 she was nominated for the Radoslav Putar young artist award and in 2008 she was shortlisted for the Vjesnik "Josip Račić" fine arts award. Croatian Association of Artists awarded her in 2009 the annual Young Artist Award.
She lives and works in Zagreb, with a studio at Žerjavićeva 19.

Most of the works displayed at our office belong to the cycle of works entitled Maps of the Found and the Unfound (pencil, acrylic, foil). In this cycle, as well as in her work in general, the artist uses various techniques to deal with the theme of city maps. The drawings represent imaginary details abstracted from a larger city map, showing streets and squares with a human figure constituting the main subject.

Artist's statement:

"IMAGE is what I notice from the ground-plan (map) of the city. Exhibited drawings are extension of my previous work with maps and they are opposition to the plan (map): all characteristics of the map disappear as mutual relations and distances, visible on larger scale and in function of orientation in a space, disappear. Drawings present street, square and building; what they keep from the map is ground plan and conviction in its visual contents. (…)

In this work, as opposed to abstract maps, carriers are recognisable ground maps of visual structure - intimate in nature - and human figure is now recognisable too. In this case, human FIGURE is recognisable at the map, be it drawn or not. It is now the carrier of the image, in contrast to earlier works where it was invisible (also not drawn), but present.(…) Change in a map scale brings new details in, which are now connected to the destiny of an individual (singular), in contrast to destinies of population (plural). (…) This time, I find fascination by human nature and its manifestations in environment in detail as the origin of what we draw on ground plans of various cities: IMAGES."