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The opening of the Ljubica Mrkalj exhibition was as unconventional as its name – White Unstill Life – The Specific Weight of a Painting. In the presence of many guests on a November evening at Belgrade’s Ethnographic Museum, the affair began with the symbolic cutting of a large pumpkin, slices of which were then added to apples, grapes, cabbage and peppers arranged on a white base of tondo mosaic. Above it, on the wall, was a painting from which the shadow of the painter reversed the flow of the essentially static vanitas, as if she had brought it to life throughout the entire gallery with a magic wand.
Across from it was the Specific Weight of a Painting, the counterpart to the White Unstill Life with the Painter’s Shadow. |
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In place of the usual expression installation, the painter chose the Serbian word nameštaljka (meaning – to be framed) to name this complex work made up of scales, a museum item, and content that was placed on two scalepans. The one contained a small-scale assortment of articles used by the painter that included, aside from a paint-smeared palette and brushes, tiny beads, shells and peppers, a small bottle, and even a cobweb. The other scalepan, the heavier of the two, carried only the painting. By measuring the painting’s specific weight, the painter opened a series of philosophical questions with regard to the role of art in the modern world.
Between these two points (the painting with the shadow and the scales) some thirty odd paintings unfolded like a frieze of white unstill lifes, including aquarelles painted between 1998 and 2007, all of the same genre. They achieve a new harmonisation as elements are merely added or removed – as in Maurice Ravel’s Boléro.
An independent balance in composition and hints of inherent dichotomy: eternity and transience, death and birth, longevity and ephemerality are established in each painting, including the aquarelles. As the viewer reaches the end/beginning following this white pure frieze, he realises that the visual sensation before his eyes has been transformed into a kind of ode to life.
And when did Ljubica Mrkalj introduce white into her unstill lifes?
During her postgraduate studies in 1971, under the direction of Professor Mladen Srbinović. Interrupting her Paris stay, Ljubica Mrkalj returned to Belgrade for additional training. In rather unsuitable work space – a prop room at the Fine Arts Academy – she marked off corner for herself with white linen sheets that she happened to find there. She also covered the floor in white and one day scattered fresh fruit that she had brought from the nearby Zeleni Venac green market, thus making a white unstill life!
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Before that and later, she painted dream-like landscapes; nudes, chimerical poetic ancient cities, Mediterranean reveries. She photographed the human body, its interesting curves.
At the same time, Ljubica Mrkalj is also a writer. Her book Ariadne's Thread, published by Plato publishers in 2004, was described by Vasa Pavković as "an imagery girded diary of fascinations".
She came from Paris at certain intervals to show all this to Belgrade and Serbia, and then return to the City of Light. Her cyclical movement has one again reached the white unstill life.
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Although this genre has been called still life for a long time, Ljubica Mrkalj reverses it into unstill life, sending the message that her paintings glorify life.
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Between Belgrade and Paris
After graduating from the Belgrade Fine Arts Academy in 1971 and completing her postgraduate studies in 1973, Ljubica Mrkalj moved to Paris where she has been living since. She makes frequent visits to Belgrade, especially since the year 2000. In addition to painting, she is also a performance artist and does artistic photography, publishes poetry and prose. She has had thirty individual exhibitions since 1966 and has participated in more than 120 collective exhibitions at home (including the former Yugoslavia) and in France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Spain, Belgium… | | 
