Olga Jančić

Olga Jančić graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and she was an associate of the Toma Rosandić’s Master Workshop between 1950 and 1955. She belonged to the Space 8 (Prostor 8) group established in 1957. She had her first solo exhibition in the Art Pavilion in 1959, and the following exhibitions in the Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art in 1965, Officers’ Club Gallery in 1977, in the Cultural Centre Gallery in 1982 and 1991. She had solo exhibitions in Ljubljana and Rijeka in 1959, Zagreb in 1960 and 1982, in Paris in 1994 and in other places. She had retrospectives in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, in 1987, and in the Heritage House in 2018. She participated in a series of exhibitions of contemporary Yugoslav art abroad, at the Venice Biennale in 1962, among others. She is represented in books on modern sculpture by Michel Seuphor (La Sculpture de ce siècle, 1959), and Herbert Read (A Concise History of Modern Sculpture, 1964).

The sculpture of Olga Jančić, following an initial figurative period, was based on typology of associative biomorphic organic form whose basic attributes she developed and elaborated during her mature and late periods. Originality of her sculptural concept with regard to the the ideal brancusian (Constantin Brâncuși) and arpian (Jean Arp) prototype of full, oblique and healthy organic form, often with explicit erotic attributes, is reflected in – especially in three dimensional forms and reliefs of her late period – distinctly expressive treatment of mass in the external outlook represented like withered and shriveled fruit stripped of potential vital energy.

OLGA JANČIĆ

Fruit I, Core 1967

Bronze 30 x 47 x 32 cm