KULTURA / CULTURE
REMEMBERING OLJA IVANJICKI The artist who lived and recorded the 20 th century
The public was so infatuated with her paintings that she was one year voted “The Best Painter of the 20 th Cen- tury”. However, on the flip side, critics weren’t always favourable either, because Olja’s “innovations”, influ- enced by the American pop art and performance that she brought back from America in 1963, didn’t fall on entirely fertile ground. She was considered too different, and her appearance only added fuel to the fire. “Every- one loved me, and everyone hated me,” said Olja, but that didn’t prevent her from authentically, expressive- ly and fearlessly, with a lot of dedicated work, leaving no one feeling apathetic. The child drew Inimitable and true to herself, Olja the artist grew up in a family of Russian emigrants, Major Vasiliy Vasil- ienko-Ivanjicki and Veronika Mihajlovna Piotrovska. Ol- ja lived in Pančevo for a grand total of five days after her birth, spending the rest of her early years in the family home in Kragujevac, surrounded by Russian emigration, until moving to Belgrade to study. She lost her moth- er to tuberculosis when she was just four years old. As a child, she would listen to the fairytales told to her by a retired general who she called ‘deduška’, and when he realised that the child liked to draw, he ordered velvet albums with blank drawing sheets. And the child drew, drew and drew... Searching for mother The scenes from her childhood, the stories she heard and the lack of a mother, left a deep impression on Ol- ja. Perhaps it was the personal pictures and drawings that her mother sent to the little Olja from the hospi- tal that compelled Olja to enter artistic waters herself, in order to somehow be closer to the one whose face she sought in her later paintings. The Ljubica Filipović school of drawing in Kragujevac was the first stop for Olja, where she learned the basics of drawing and paint- ing as a young girl. She enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, studying sculpture in the class of Sreten Stojanović, where she also earned her master’s degree. Time with Šejka Just a year after Olja’s birth, in the same Russian hospital in Pančevo, Leonid Šejka was also born. He was a student of architecture when their paths crossed. The art group Mediala, the rebellion of youth, arose from the aspirations of Olja and Leonid Šejka to discover the es- sence of art, to combine opposites, to escape the vicious circle of socialist realism that then reigned supreme in contemporary art, to provoke their surroundings and to be noticed, but always on the art front. On the per- sonal front, Olja and Leonid parted ways, though they maintained a friendly relationship until the end of his life (1970). After his death, Olja would say that one of her life tasks was to talk about Šejka as long as she was still breathing. She also published their correspondence, under the title “Mirror of Love”, in 1994.
She combined the incompatible in her oeuvre: cosmonauts and Renaissance ladies; Russians and Americans; myths and Hollywood divas; interplanetary exploration and pop-art humour T his 24 th June will mark the 15 th anniversa- ry of the departure from this world of Olga Olja Ivanjicki (10 th May, 1931 – 24 th June, 2009), sculptor, painter, multimedia art- ist, poet and unique star of the artistic sky of the former Yugoslavia. From Slovenia to Macedo- nia and from Rovinj to Belgrade, Ivanjicki exhibited, created and existed in the consciousness of the pub- lic and art critics as one of the bearers of the new, dif- ferent, modern and worldly…
44 | Umetnost » Art
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