Figurative Paintings of Andela Tucakovic

Anđela Tucaković is a contemporary figurative artist based in Croatia and she is a first-time contributor to The New Yorker Life. Even though she is new on the international art scene, her work has taken place in various solo and group exhibitions in London, Madrid, Milan, Genova, and Athens.

She primarily paints with acrylics. In her opus, one can find many motifs, from portraits to everyday objects poetically set in symbolic compositions. She uses introspective, intertextual, and intermedial methods, supplied with mementos from her own life and wild dreams, but this does not make the evaluation of her paintings obscure. On the contrary, the intimate diary-like character of her art draws attention and results in a level of universal understanding.

I have been interested in creating for as long as I can remember. I always sketched, made collages, and wrote stories throughout my childhood. I guess I set my mind on visual arts when I was thirteen. I was particularly fascinated by hyperrealism, so I took some pencils and paper and gave it a try. Very soon, it became almost an obsession. If I weren’t at school, I would draw portraits in my room. Around two years later, when I was a high school junior, I had the honor of opening my first solo exhibition in Šibenik, Croatia. After graduating from high school, the logical move was to continue my artistic development, so I enrolled at the art academy and got my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2020.

I have always had a particular fondness for iconography, anthropology, music, literature, and poetry, which I think have strongly influenced my recent artwork. I feel that untangling undistinguished thoughts and constantly seeking for what lurks underneath the surface of my consciousness is a crucial aspect of my process. After deciding on a painting, I translate that non-tangible complex idea into a visual, symbolic narrative with the help of specific objects and figuring out their angles and placements in the overall composition. In the process, I make decisions about the treatment of color, light and, texture while making sure that the composition is visually fluent. Each element of my paintings occupies several layers; they are entities of my expression, as well as a variation on traditional references which rises on theoretical disciplines of art.