13/12/2025 – 29/03/2026,

Jelena Bulajić: Untitled (after)

, Kunsthalle Münster

With Untitled (after) the Kunsthalle Münster will present the first solo exhibition by Jelena Bulajić in a German institution, providing an overview of the work of the Serbian artist. Bulajić's works are tools for exploring the media-mediated view of the world, speculations about dimensions of reality. They possess their own logic of showing and revealing, emerging from an intensive engagement with the pictorial, its conditions and possibilities.

The exhibition brings together various groups of works by the artist, including new pieces created especially for the presentation at the Kunsthalle and, for the first time, sculptures. The juxtaposition of the different groups of works and the interplay of figuration and abstraction reveal a concept of image-making that invites viewers to engage with perception. At a time when we are constantly surrounded by digital images and confronted with the same reception on the screen, Bulajić uses the conditions of painting and sculpture to see. In doing so, an examination of what we call images, as the artist carries it out, questioning their narrative and truth content, seems to be of particular importance, especially against the backdrop of the ubiquitous flood of images. It is about training the senses. Her play with reality requires concentration, close observation, and questioning of what we see.

Bulajić explores the medium of painting in its various facets. While it is primarily the motif that attracts the viewer's attention at first glance, on closer inspection it is above all the tactility and surface that are significant. Painted with a mixture of marble dust, ground granite, limestone, and kaolin, the existential spirit of the works is not a contemplation of mortality, but rather a formal exploration of tactility and surface. In recent years, Bulajić has expanded traditional notions of portraiture beyond the human figure and extended her treatment of surface as a dualistic reflection of physical layers: structures of the human skin, water, rocks and the paint itself with all its physical qualities, are the “raw material” of her works and constitute their physicality, the skin of the picture. The sky, the water, and the abstract works are “mere surfaces of paint and pigment,” according to Bulajić. When comparing or viewing her photorealistic works alongside her supposedly abstract series White on Black, one is confronted with the question of what media-mediated realism actually means. In different ways, both groups of works are declarations of faith in the medium of painting and its qualities in relation to photography. It is not representational realism, but rather a questioning of it. It is the deception that fascinates her, the disappointment with which she herself works. Her pictures reveal their artificiality.

Given her preoccupation with the materiality of paint and the surface of painting, Bulajić's turn to sculpture seems like a logical next step. Her series After Stone (2025) reflects on the ambivalence of fragility and stability and explores questions of permanence and transience.

Jelena Bulajić was born in 1990 in Vrbas, Serbia; she lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia and Herceg Novi, Montenegro. Her works have been shown in numerous international solo and group exhibitions: Salon of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2024), carlier | gebauer, Madrid (2024), Dots Gallery, Belgrade (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art of Vojvodina, Novi Sad (2019), The Saatchi Gallery, London (2016), Workshop, London (2016). Among the awards she has received are the GAM MA Fine Art Prize, City & Guilds of London Art School (2013), the Niš Art Foundation Award (2013), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2012) and the Grand Diploma for Drawing, XIV INTERBIFEP (2011).