13/12/2025 – 15/03/2026,

Jelena Bulajić

, Kunsthalle Münster

From December 2025 to March 2026, Kunsthalle Münster will be showing Jelena Bulajić's first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, providing an overview of the work of the Serbian artist, who explores the medium of painting in its various facets in her works. While it is the motif that superficially attracts the viewer's attention, at second glance it is the tactility and surface that are of particular importance. The colour itself appears as a living material—something that a motif tends to hide. The surfaces—the cracks, lines and signs of age—are the real subject. Bulajić's works have their own logic of showing and revealing, emerging from an intensive preoccupation with the pictorial, its conditions and possibilities. It is a painterly reflection, based on an equivalence between seeing and thinking, that characterises her artistic work. Using painterly means, she questions the memorable power of evidence, examines perception and the role that the fabrication and nature of images and objects play in this.

The exhibition brings together older, already existing works with new works created for the presentation in the Kunsthalle. Her works are tools for exploring the mediated view of the world, speculations on the dimensions of reality. At a time when we are constantly surrounded by digital photography and confronted with the constant reception of all kinds of images on the screen, Bulajić uses the conditions of painting to see. An examination of what we call images or objects, as the artist does, the questioning of their narrative and truth content, seems to be of particular importance, especially against the background of the omnipresent flood of images. In addition to the obvious interpretation that an image is not identical to the original object, we are forced to reflect on what we understand by the reality of an object. It is about training the senses, which are increasingly in danger of atrophying. Playing with reality requires concentration, a close look and scrutinising the images.

Jelena Bulajić was born in 1990 in Vrbas, Serbia; she lives and works in Belgrade, Serbia. 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).