About
Artist Statement
I paint what the mind glimpses, what dissolves when named too quickly — mental, sensory, and emotional impressions of contemporary life, with its disrupted patterns and intangible forms. As a painter and digital designer, my practice explores the threshold between intuition and computation, inviting viewers to reflect on the screens they engage with, from digital displays to the inner landscapes of imagination, memory, and dreams. Through distortion and ambiguity, addition and subtraction, my process-led paintings bridge the virtual and the spiritual, becoming visual investigations of perception — at times fragmented, at times profoundly interconnected.
Bio
Ðurđica Selec, also known as Djuro is a digital designer turned painter. Her work encapsulates the interplay between technology, perception, and the intangible, which she explores through painting, drawing and embroidery. Hailing originally from Croatia, she divides her time between her art studio in London, UK and her farmhouse retreat in Andalusia, Spain. Upon receiving her BFA First Class Honours with the Art Academy in London, she was awarded the Liberty Specialty Markets Art Award 2022/23. She has continued her art education with Turps Education in 2022/23 and 2023/24. She exhibits in London and is a member of the Unprimed art collective.
CV
-
work / education / awards
2023 - 2024 - Turps Art School Correspondence Course
2022 - 2023 - Turps Art School Correspondence Course
2022 - 2024 - Liberty Specialty Markets Art Award
2019 - 2022 - BA Fine Art, First Class Honours, Art Academy London
2019 - Drawing Foundation with The University for the Creative Arts at OU
2015 - 2020 - co-founder and designer, Space Squirrel
2010 - 2014 - runs Illo.me, a character illustration studio
2007 - 2016 - independent digital designer
2007 - Tanay studio, Zagreb, Croatia - creative painting degree with Emil Tanay
2005 - History and English language, Faculty of Philosophy, Osijek, Croatia
-
exhibitions / fairs
UPCOMING:
May 2025 - Split, Turps group show, Wigan, UK
Mar-Apr 2025 - Split, Turps group show, Wrexham, UK
Oct 2024 - Layers, Unprimed collective show, Brixton, LondonMay 2024 - Drawing Open, group show, No Format Gallery, London
Apr 2024 - Lick, group show, Safehouse Peckham, London
Nov 2023 - Painting Open, group show, No Format Gallery, London
Sept 2023 - Modern Life, duo exhibition, Deptford X Festival, London
Sept 2023 - Do Not Swallow, group show, Safehouse Peckham, London
June-July 2023 - The Other Art Fair, London
May 2023 - SFSA Open Studios, London
March-April 2023 - Mud, for you, group show, Fitzrovia Gallery, London
July 2022 - Graduate Showcase at the Art Academy London, Borough, London
April-May 2022 - Ambient Anxiety, duo exhibition, Curious Kudu, Peckham, London
Sep - Oct 2021 - peer group exhibition One Fine Day, Fazenda, Spitalfields, London
July 2020 - peer group exhibition Turning Point, online
process video
"Djuro’s work at first seems a bright and bold venture into a digital world of computer graphics. But the soft colours hide a harder reality. Under their surface is a different world – a manipulative and seductive place of traps and fault lines, disruptive, dangerous and overwhelming. She is interested in the very contemporary tension between the real and virtual worlds, and how our dependence on ever more powerful technology creates confusion between the two."
~ Leslie Manasseh, Brixton Blog
-
Practice
Djuro combines the spontaneous nature of paint application like spray paint or pouring with controlled masking techniques, brushstrokes, using acrylic and oil paints. She incorporates paint-soaked netting and a process of masking, adding and subtracting layers, building anachronistic compositions that create visual interference evocative of screen glitches, as well as of hypnagogic, inner eye images.
-
Style
The artist's visual dialect blends technology with the esoteric and spiritual, going beyond the screen as merely a technological output. Mimicking and lovingly mocking computer screens, her work borrows from over a decade of graphic design experience in the tech sector. Her art reflects a continuous quest for balance: screen-nature, techie-luddite, and the digital-spiritual.
“I find that nothing articulates virtual as well as the glitch does. Like beauty, it commands our attention, and wakes us up. We notice being plucked out of immediate reality and sucked into a virtual one.
As digital noise blurs the boundaries between the tangible and the ephemeral,
I invite the viewer into such a mindful opportunity.”
~ Djuro