mira miric

Aims and Values


My work comes out of need: it relies on the intuitive and the personal. It deals with the inner world rather than the outer one. The outer one can be easily described and acknowledged, whilst the inner one is less tangible and more mysterious. This is the world that i find most challenging: the world of feelings and emotions, the world that, sometimes, can be difficult to put into words.

I consider feelings and emotions, as our primary and immediate response to the surrounding world, to be an authentic and truthful expression of ourselves. I wish to explore this: I am interested in the tensions and conflicts between our emotional, intuitive responses and our intellectual and rational faculties, and how we negotiate between the two in our everyday lives. My own emotions and feelings are the starting point of visual research, but my work aims to transcend the individual and deal with the general and universal aspects of the human condition.

I believe in art as a door to a different realm; a meditative and contemplative art, an art that provides aesthetic and spiritual fulfilment, transcending language, personal and cultural differences. Modernism, with its universal, transcendent and humanistic values, provides a historical context for my work.


About the Work


My work is abstract, my practice is rigorous: I have pared down the elements of the visual vocabulary to its bare essentials. I paint mostly on canvas, as a flat, sensual and traditional surface. The palette has been reduced to red, black or white for their dramatic value and contrast. As a background, these colours offer the ideal setting for the exploration of line, as the intuitive, direct and reliable articulation of ourselves. Line pervades throughout the work, as its two or three dimensional component. The canvas forms a backdrop for the dripping paint, or elastic band and thread, which are stretched over or wrapped around the canvas, constricting, but, at the same time, protecting it... Occasionally, the line will travel further and wrap itself around various every day objects, such as discarded plastic bottles, pipes, dowelling...

Duality, conflict and ambiguity are important elements of my work on a conceptual and visual level: they convey the tension between the conscious and the subconscious, spontaneous and obsessive, orderly and disorderly, gestural and repetitive...



In the End



The creative process is as important as the finished object: for the work of art to have depth and impact, it has to be, as Amish Kapoor stated, 'truly made', to be a perfect embodiment of artist's thoughts, materials and processes. It is my hope that I do produce such a cohesive body of work.

Once again, I wish to emphasise my positive belief in art as an abstraction of life. I do not aim to challenge, negate or deconstruct tradition; I only wish to expand its possibilities. My work brings no social or political commentary; instead, it calls for contemplation and reflection. My paintings, sculptures and drawings are open to interpretation, but I hope that the viewer can intuitively identify, recognize and share my own passion for art and life.