Viewing Ivana Bašić at Albion Jeune

New York-based artist Ivana Bašić’s first solo exhibition at Albion Jeune opens this week – drawings and sculpted hybrid bodies in symbolic and evocative materials, ranging from wax, white bronze and brown glass, to copper and stainless steel that evoke the artist’s early experiences of violence as her native Yugoslavia collapsed.

These abstracted bodily forms are “imbued with potential, evoking gestures of opening up and blossoming, while the reality of what they are fleeing – war, technological advances, political instability – lingers darkly in the background.”

The exhibition also includes a series of watercolour drawings on paper, the conceptual lynchpin for the show: elliptical forms and suggestions of circularity in image and form that contemplate the origins of existence, the formation of the body and regeneration – a blueprint for the sculptures. A complex and original debut from an artist to watch.