Hrvojka Novačić was born in Nikinci, a village in Syrmia historically home to a Croatian community, today in Serbia. A self-taught artist, she brings to painting the freedom of someone who learned by looking, feeling and experimenting, free of academic constraints. That freedom is felt in the paint itself: the brushwork is loose, often laid with a palette knife, built through accumulations of light rather than outlines. Drawing never imprisons the form; it lets it breathe.
Her work moves across two complementary registers. On one side a symbolist, oneiric vein of Secessionist descent — Klimt and the Jugendstil come to mind in the gold, the decorative motifs and the translucency of the bodies — in which woman becomes an allegory of transformation and threshold. On the other, an impressionist figuration devoted to the contemporary female figure, caught in the light of the sea or the street, between elegance, fashion and movement. Binding the two worlds is a constant subject, the feminine, and a happy obsession with light: the light that passes through skin, swells a fabric, settles on a hat.
The palette favours warm–cool chords: ochre, gold and amber flesh tones against dusty blues and pearly greys. The result is a suspended, sensory atmosphere in which mood matters as much as subject.
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