Ljiljana Blaževska
Nicholas Heskes, The Brooklyn Rail
March 2021
This exhibition at 15 Orient is the first of Serbian-Macedonian painter Ljiljana Blazevska’s in the United States. Her name is fairly unknown outside the scene of artists she showed with in Belgrade starting in the 1970s, and even less so outside the region of former Yugoslavia. Seeming to have followed the tail end of a Surrealist revival in Belgrade lead by members of the Mediala group like Leonid Šejka and Olja Ivanjicki, Blazevska’s work reflects this turn, with its mystical, rebellious inclination to wed ancient and modern. Despite this though, her light and vibrant palette shares a great deal with notable French school painters like Marko Čelebonović and Ljubica Sokić, who were both teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade when Blazevska completed her studies there in 1969. But the context that makes Blazevska’s work approachable in the US is obscured by the extremely personal, sequestered nature it has all of its own, that makes each painting, like a private dream or memory, untranslatable for the viewer. […]