Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery

Nikoleta Sekulovic

Spain

Nikoleta Sekulovic is a rising star of contemporary figurative painting. Her richly worked, and richly imagined, ‘portraits' recover lost pasts and suggest possible futures. Each painting is an act of homage to a great female figure: a poet, philosopher, activist, or literary heroine: from the Victorian mathematician, Countess Ada Lovelace, to the New Zealand suffragette, Kate Sheppard, via Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson.
Sekulovic’s art engages with the notion of identity in a profound and symbolic way. The artist’s distinctive style is imbued with a sense of contemporary craftsmanship that recalls Pre Raphaelite design philosophy. The iconic legacy of Victorian artist, poet and social activist, William Morris, and his female contemporaries, is a pertinent fount of inspiration. Through her expressive transcription of Morris’s original floral designs, and her inscription of opposite written texts on to the back of her canvases, Sekulovic celebrates – and connects with – the moral