Merien King

Ana-Marija Kralj is a young artist with a distinctive and atypical expression. It is completely contradictory to the artist’s fragile appearance, but perfectly compatible with her strong spirit. Working with such heavy material is a challenge that even more experienced artists most often avoid. In contact and work with metal, endurance and patience are required for its rough processing, as well as

the will to get to know the physical and chemical processes that occur in its processing. A dose of curiosity and adventurism is also needed because such a procedure is a living process during which the final appearance of the work is unpredictable. The process is exactly what the artist herself emphasizes as the most important part of her art. The result can never be fully predicted and it is this moment of uncertainty and spontaneity that is the main feature of her technique that ensures the uniqueness of each work. Ana-Marija bravely treads the lonely and pioneering path of experimenting with metal painting, which is ideologically in line with the radical informal Ivo Gattin and Eugen Feller from the early 1960s, but manifested in a somewhat milder and above all more elegant form. In all of them, the process of creating a work is in the center of interest and dictates the final appearance of the work. But as much as the aforementioned duo torments the material to the point of exhausted unrecognizability, so much does our artist manage to impose the aesthetics of the final product in the first place.