Dunja Jankovic Cocktail opening Thursday 21st November 6-8pm

Cocktail opening with Dunja Jankovic

Of Mothers and Others

Sarah Kravitz Gallery is thrilled to announce the exhibition Of Mothers and Others with Dunja Jankovic’s new drawings in pastel, pencil and crayon on paper curated by Maximiliane Leuschner.

Of Mothers and Others is an amalgamation of twenty dynamic and illusionistic drawings—some technical, others of more intuitive nature. Within Jankovic’s ever-evolving practice on paper, this new series marks a return to manual drawing. Begun first as a therapeutic outlet, then as a meditative exercise in response to the harm inflicted on mothers and others in war- and conflict zones, Of Mothers and Others registers a new bulbous shape as part of Jankovic’s visual vocabulary: an organic vase, urn, or else that—depending on our interpretation—oscillates between growth and grief. The use of pastel, pencil and crayon give the bulbous expanse a figurative character, while the directional lines inside expand vertically, horizontally, diagonally and in more voluted forms to support and distort this figuration. Think of Clarice Lispector who, in Água Viva (1973), mused, ‘I write in signs that are more a gesture than a voice. […] I remake myself in these lines, I have a voice. As I throw myself into the line of my drawing, this is an exercise in life, without planning. The world has no visible order and all I have is the order of my breath. I let myself happen.’

Borrowing its modified title from Siri Hustvedt’s memoir on parenthood, memory, and the nurturers that came before her, Of Mothers and Others is also an ode to mothers and others who nurture, care, and create. From Venuses and fertility goddesses, to the mothers and others from whom we emerge, the exhibition showcases twenty bulbous entities on paper that grow organically and intuitively, like the many nurturers and caretakes that live many different lives in one. At Sarah Kravitz Gallery, they mediate and mourn love and loss, creation and destruction in rhythmic juxtapositions, both visually and in form of poetic titles.