In these modern times, that are craving for some new and positive system of values, the important role of an artist – besides the role of one that holds a mirror reflecting the epoch – is inevitably becoming a kind of a priestly mission to offer the way to reshape reality with the pure view… Those artists, who heartily believe that creativity has the power to transform – in the sense of essential metamorphosis/transfiguration – and that it can change themselves and their audience, belong to an endangered kind of artists, and it is our duty to support them.

One of such artists is Nataša Knjazovic. A close relationship between herself and her paintings is evident. And this statement has a double meaning because of the fact that she lives intertwined with her creative work but also because she comes from the family of painters, from the sunny and rich pictorial vineyard of Knjazovic family. In order to form an authentic iconography of the work of Nataša Knjazovic, it was important to have this background of innocent and playful world view, and it is carved into her heart by heritage from her grandfather Jan and her mother Ana Knjazovic, the two naive painters with suggestive visual universes and almost religious devotion. Awareness and subtility with which Nataša is reinterpreting the elements of their visual poetic on her paintings are another proof that a good gene has magically tripled while going on and growing through all the three hearts of Knjazovic family.

In Nataša’s work, we can clearly recognize a woman’s touch and woman’s soul: a delightful (Dream), refined (My World), wickedly playful (Harlequinade) and sometimes painfully intense (Balkanika) inner world, whose heroine is the artist herself: different on each canvas, but still recognizable. Nataša’s self-portraits are often on the verge of reference to her character, actually showing endless possibilities of her being, a vibrating entity always searching and reshaping itself with insatiable curiosity, like in some magical theater, where she is trying the new masks over and over again.

As a heroine of the western pictorial tradition portrayed by male painters, woman is usually being reduced to a carnal aspect or to strictly defined woman’s role in a man’s world, while through relatively new tradition of a female self-portrait (this subject is being specifically talked about in public since Frida Kahlo, but in the light of women’s social emancipation the history of art has also noticed some of earlier female artists like Sofonisba Anguissola or Hildegard von Bingen) we are getting all those complex nuances of female character, sensibility and world view. From this point of view, Nataša Knjazovic belongs to one rich conglomerate of the contemporary female artists with self-researching vision.

Formally, Nataša’s canvas manifest the artistic inheritance of the Knjazovic family: its form stylization, space dimensionality, expressionistic and symbolic use of color, but at the same time showing greater tendency towards the representative, followed by more diverse palette, sometimes close to naturalistic one and built on bright color hues, clear and raw, or more frequently from the pastel gamma, which this painter always puts on as the new mask to play the new role and build an atmosphere of the specific painting. Formal aspects of her paintings serve to fulfill the meaningful art layer, leading from metaphor to narration.

Besides the figure of the main heroine, Nataša’s imaginarium includes multiple spaces, room – canvas on canvas – window-sky, mutually intertwined and creating the stage, on which the pursuit of love or daydreaming about love is taking place; as well as various mystical symbols like apple, ladder, birds or flower (often it is a sunflower covering the fields around Kovačica, and also the paintings of Ján and Ana Knjazovic); symbols taken from the Orthodox iconography, the myths, and – in more recent works – a contemporary visual culture, such as the character of Charlie Chaplin as her companion, and why not, as her alter-ego in a theatrical, life and artistic adventure…

In these times, when people do not distinguish themselves anymore from the rough masks behind which are they hiding from the others and from themselves, we have to appreciate such artists as Nataša Knjazovic, who – with steady enthusiasm and some kind of divine humor – through countless characters expose their own and universal human essence: the vulnerability, childlike playfulness, introspection into one’s own soul universe and endless search for love… Thank you, Nataša…

Ana Đorđević