Maya Kulenovic Canadian, b. 1975

Maya Kulenovic (1975, Sarajevo, SFR Yugoslavia) is a Canadian artist based in Toronto. She studied art at the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, and at the Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul. She is also an alumna of London Goodenough College in London, England.

Kulenovic’s paintings and sculptures often depict borderline states that encompass being and non-being, trance and wakefulness, stillness and action. All of the subjects – figures as well as places – are at once the protagonists and the settings of her ‘still narratives’. Marked by traces of past events or filled with anticipation of the imminent, they haunt and are haunted. Even though many influences are visible in her work, from classical sculpture and painting to film, photography and architecture, Kulenovic’s work resist being assigned a genre or style. There is a relationship to realism and to history in her imagery, but it would be more accurate to think of her work in terms of speculative fiction, distorted memories, dreams or premonitions about the future.

In 2008 we published a book about her work with an introduction by Edward Lucie-Smith in collaboration with d'Jonge Hond Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her latest monograph, Fugue, including an essay by Mark Kingwell, was published in 2017 in Toronto, Canada.

Maya Kulenovic's paintings have been exhibited in more than thirty solo exhibitions and many more group exhibitions and art fairs in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, the United States, Ireland, Italy, Japan, South Korea and Turkey. Her work can be found in many collections around the world.