Jelena
Petkovic

Jelena Petkovic is an oil painter, born in 1990 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, currently living in Paris. She was raised by her mother and grandfather, both architects and amateur artists, so her love of drawing, painting and art in general came at a very young age. She attended her first private class of painting at age 13, preparing the entry exam for the art high school she later joined. Even though she showed talent and passion for painting she decided to study interior design as it opened more professional opportunities in Serbia. Throughout her studies she naturally found painting her favorite subject and had the chance to develop her style thanks to her professor that saw her potential and gave her the freedom she needed. In the last year of university, she participated to an exhibition of student artists with an abstract self-portrait. The face stretching over the canvas was separated in different geometrical shape symbolizing the different parts of the self. Here and in future work she focused on human condition and on a question that drives her interest in psychology, spirituality and self-development: “Who am I?”. In 2013 she obtained a bachelor’s in interior design at the faculty of Art and Design from the Megatrend University of Belgrade.

In 2015 she moved to Paris, where after two years in different jobs she decided to make her long-life love – painting, her career. She spent two years in creating a whole new collection of paintings (20 paintings in total) and just one month after finishing her last painting she got the opportunity to present an exhibition of her work at CIEM, Paris in 2019.

The style that she developed is the base of her new work, still looking at understanding who we are but now more connected with our relationship towards one another and the state of the world. Her travels and interest in observing the human condition is always pulling her forward to new visual solutions, but always with the same goal: to illustrate the beauty of our differences, all that makes us unique, while understanding that even though we are individual we are still part of a whole.