Sonja Brzak | ArtGallery.co.uk

Born in Zagreb, Sonja Brzak ends high artistic education in Ljubljana Arthouse-College of Visual Arts where she acquired the title of graduate painter. Her paintings are rich in color, to attract viewers for color harmony and their complementarity. On each canvas is dominated by the figure or figures in the second position. In the background is frequently denied, leaving the viewer the ability to focus on the characters and look for a new angle of view, and that the characters tell their story which makes us positive emotions. Play with the colors, the characters come to us in the characteristics and often in an abstract way. Continuous research opportunities in oil on canvas creates vivid and impressive creations. The movements of the brush and painting provide cutting edge technology, commitment and high aesthetic value of each work and the dominant quality.The most frequent painting subjectof the academy-trained painter Sonja Brzak is a human figure. The painter is devoted to depicting one or more human figures that she connects and blends into one unbreakable unity. Her work consists mostly of paintings that seem abstract at first sight and are composed of many sharp-edged shapes in clean and dominant colours red and blue. However, only few paintings are completely undefined in terms of their theme and they distance themselves from the subject with their geometric abstraction. The painter sometimes experiments with automatism and uncontrolled bodily movements, and she softens or “liberates” the sharpness and hardness of geometric motifs by dripping light or dark colours on colourful canvases, and by doing so, she creates a swirling composition of small and large marks. Her most suggestive work is without doubt related to depiction of human figures that she stylizes and transforms into abstract forms. Recognisability of motifs is not treated the same in all her work; it varies from one painting to another, and the shape of the human body is gradually “dissolved” beyond recognition. Therefore, in some of the paintings human figures are, although fragmented in many shapes, clearly drawn and emphasized by colour and lines, and the observer can easily distinguish body parts. Other paintings show a shift towards stronger stylization marked by the loss of body lines in a complex grid of lines, and the vagueness and connection between shapes are made stronger by an identical set of colours used for depicting figures. In the end, the gradation of stylization leads to abstract composition of shapes, and only painted stylized heads may point to the fact that the subject of the painting is a depiction of body.Sonja Brzak often comes back to figurative painting and to realism, by painting a series of idealized portraits of pretty, young women, more precisely their heads in (if we use the parameter of a movie shot) close-up. The focus is on the faces that take up all the canvas surface and often go “outside” of the frames, which emphasizes their size. Eyes that are framed with black and rough make-up dominate their faces. Colours used are reduced to ochre and brown tones with a few accents of blue or dimmed red. We can also notice realism in paintings containing nude women, in which the colours used show the painter’s split tendency towards, on the one side, strong and vivid colours, and on the other, towards subtle shades of tonal painting. Paintings are enriched with pastel, soft tones and offer to the observer a harmonious colour game full of vivacity. Colours are applied with broad brushstrokes, reflecting the painter’s passion and pleasure in relation to the act of painting itself, to the materiality of pigment and to the beauty of its colours. Free of restrictive dark lines that we find in most of the work, they mix and connect freely, thus creating scales and relations of colours pleasing to the eye. The colours used are exactly what promises interesting solutions to some of the new ways of expression in painting. Her works are found throughout Europe in private collections.

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