About
Artist's Statement
As a contemporary painter and a tech professional, Djuro aims to portray the vibrant chaos of screen culture. Her complex relationship with technology fuels her artistic vision, expressing an emotional journey, from deprivation and addiction to enthusiasm and cautious consumption, all in a balanced visual frenzy. Drawing inspiration from both digital expanse and her immediate surroundings, she handcrafts a canvas that marries the virtual with the tactile.
Djuro’s process-led paintings are whimsical "digital landscapes" that bear the imprint of screens, infused with her signature painting technique, and marked by playful disruption. There's a rebellious lack of compositional hierarchy and pictorial sense; instead, layers collide and interact, mirroring the most human tendency tech demonstrates: a lag, a bug, a glitch.
“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.”
Bio
Durdica Selec, also known as Djuro [jUro:h], is a painter turned digital designer turned fine artist. Her work encapsulates the persistent techno utopian ambience of our contemporary existence, which she explores through painting, digital art, and embroidery.
Djuro combines the spontaneous nature of spray paint with a controlled application of masking techniques and brushstrokes, which she applies on canvas in anachronistic layers, achieving a visual interference evocative of a screen glitch. Her visual dialect mimics and lovingly mocks computer screens, borrowing from over a decade of graphic design work in the tech sector. Her art is influenced by a continuous quest for balance: work-life, screen-nature, a techie-luddite.
Hailing originally from Croatia, Djuro now divides her time between her life and art studio in South London, UK and her desert retreat in Andalusia, Spain. Upon receiving her BFA First Class Honours with the Art Academy London, she was awarded the Liberty Specialty Markets Art Award 2022/23. She exhibits in London and continues her painting studies with Turps Art School.
CV
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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
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exhibitions / fairs
UPCOMING: 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
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Method
I use spray paint which I apply through tulle netting that I’ve painted on with latex paint. A lot of layers are masked off before I apply the next one. Most of my pieces are planned in a graphic software, photographed mid-creation and glitched in code to see where the algorithms would take it. In that sense, the canvas becomes my digital graphic file, cutting and pasting until the perfect distortion appears. It is an ongoing migration of image and format, from screen to canvas, from machine to human and, as you view them now – back agai
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Reason
Following the trail of Hito Steyerl and Legacy Russel’s writing, I celebrate the glitch as an agent of resistance to the machine and a signifier of humanlike traits in technology. Glitch expresses our collective anxieties, our techno-utopian desires, and reminds us we are sane in our maladjustment. It shows idiosyncrasies in our collectively dreamed-up, hyper-connected world. Likewise, my paintings are imaginary artifacts of the information age: lacking in pictorial sense, they offer noise and resolution: an art of carefully planned accidents.
