Marta Jovanovic recent work focuses on the genre of portraiture and the concept beauty in contemporary photography. She starts from a democratic, all-inclusive stance: everybody deserves to be represented. Her photographs speak about limitation of the traditional canon of beauty. Although photographs themselves are beautiful, their aesthetics convey a strong disdain for fashion standards of contemporary beauty. This is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of her strategy: offering the viewer a lush highly polished, glossy, large-format photograph in order to subvert the medium of fashion photography.
The artist offers a critical intervention into the notion of contemporary femininity in representation by mimicking the ways in which it was treated in the oeuvre of celebrated photographers such as Vanessa Beecroft and David Lachapelle.
Inspiration for Dance Rehearsal Project was born from Marta’s fascination with the motif of sacrifice of a young virgin every early spring from the ballet The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky.
Belgrade-born, Rome based visual artist Marta Jovanovic graduated from Tulane University. Another strong impact on her formation as an artist is a classical education in the Renaissance Florence where, in the years spent there, she learned the relativity of beauty canons upon which her work is based. Marta has been exhibiting around the world and in her native Serbia, collaborating with curators like Achile Bonito Oliva and Umberto Scrocca. Her edgy contemporary works have been exhibited in traditional museum spaces like Pietro Canonica Museum in Rome in 2009. Marta is represented by the Bosi Artes Gallery from Rome.
Belgrade-born, New York-based art historian and critic Jovana Stokic holds a Ph.D from the Institute of Fine Arts at the New York University. Her dissertation, titled “The Body Beautiful: Feminine Self-Representations 1970 – 2007,” analyzes works of several women artists – Marina Abramovic, Martha Rosler, Joan Jonas — since the 1970s, particularly focusing on the notions of self-representation and beauty. Jovana has been writing art criticism for several years, and has curated several thematic exhibitions and performance events in the US, Italy, Spain and Serbia. Jovana was a fellow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, a researcher at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the curator of the Kimmel Center Galleries, New York University. She has most recently written an essay for Marina Abramovic's MoMA exhibition catalogue.
Special thanks to Jan Fabre for his support and Linda Adami, Tom Buys, Cédric Charron, Bert Huysentruyt, Katrin Lohmann, Kurt Vandendreissche, Kasper Vanderberghe and Bern Vandevn for their generous participation in this project.
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