Lidija Delić
Take your time (2022)
Lidija Delić's artistic practice is conceptually and structurally based on an inter-media research of the connections between mental processes and the spaces that surround them. She starts from the idea that we cannot understand the world around us as a system of predefined objects and concepts that we then rationally choose, but as a dense, unfinished network in which the stability of things is only a reflection of the stability of their images. In that manner, Take your time shows the dining room at one of Belgrade’s most famous congress halls made in the 1970s, before its current renovation. The chairs allude to what is not there, making the absence of people the most palpable element of the painting: the degree of stability of their own visual presence dictates our eyes to gaze and search for the missing element.
photography and text: courtesy of the artist and the collection
Lidija Delić Biography
Lidija Delić (b. 1986, Nikšić, Montenegro) lives and works in Belgrade. Her recent exhibitions include: Still, life, Alba, Vienna, Austria (2023); The Ordinary Things, ICA - Sofia Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (2022), With luck, there’ll be no more dreams, Eugster II Belgrade (2021), Too Soon, Too Late, Manifesto Belgrade (2020), The West Island, Belgrade Youth Center (2018). Lidija represented Montenegro at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, her work was shown at the 57th October Salon in Belgrade (2018) and she represented Serbia at the 18th International Biennial of Young Artists of Europe and the Mediterranean (BJCEM), in Tirana, Albania (2017). She was a finalist of the Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos Award for 2017 and in 2019 she participated in a residency program in New York organized by the Balkan Project and the Swiss Institute in New York. She is one of the founding members of Belgrade’s artist-run space U10 (since 2012) and she has been employed at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade as an assistant professor since 2021.