About
Artist Statement
As a contemporary painter and a digital designer, I aim to portray the vibrant chaos of screen culture and its impact on focus, memory and perception. My process-led paintings are a visual frenzy of overlapping and interfering image planes, imitating misbehaving digital media files, mental overlaps and sensory overloads. By adding and subtracting, location and medium switching, my canvas layers come out in a distorted medley, evoking the most human tendency technology displays, a glitch, a mishap.
Bio
Ðurđica Selec, also known as Djuro is a digital designer turned painter. Her work encapsulates the pervasiveness of electronic displays in contemporary life, which she explores through painting, drawing and embroidery. Hailing originally from Croatia, she now divides her time between her art studio in South London, UK and her desert 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 part of the Unprimed art collective.
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:
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
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Practice
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.
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Style
The artist's 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: screen-nature, techie-luddite, figuration-distortion.
“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