Lidija Ristić is a Serbian-American interdisciplinary artist living and working between Belgrade and New York. The essence of her practice is the making of hybrids and amalgamations. This manifests through the combined use of found objects, readily available materials from hardware/dollar stores, pharmacies, upcycled/post-consumer products and the seamless blending of digital processes, traditional crafts and a wide range of fine art techniques. The results of this approach come in the form of sculpture, digital collage, installation, video work, audience lead participation and performance.
Ristić received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in sculpture with a minor in painting and an MFA in Studio Art from New York University. She was one of the founders of the collective art workspace, 24k Studios, the mobile gallery, 24k Studios Presents, and was the creative director for the charity food pop-up, Hungry Babes, in San Francisco, where she was based until 2018. In addition, she has worked in museum preparations, as a lighting technician and as an undergraduate college instructor. All of these influences are present in her practice. Her work has been displayed in group and solo shows around the US and internationally and she is a member of the artist-run, independent project space, Paradice Palase, in Brooklyn, NY. She has been invited to be an artist in residence at intuitions like Pilotenkueche International Art Program in Germany. Her work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions in cities across the world, including in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Berlin, Leipzig and Belgrade. Ristić has appeared in televised and print interviews on multiple national Serbian news outlets as well as in many international digital and print art publications including Artforum.
In her work she strives to create complexity. This is achieved through layering that takes place on a multitude of levels. In the physical and immediate sense, it is seen by how she combines materials, both fabricated and found, in intricate ways that both celebrate their material nature and abstract them into new contexts through proximity to often disparate elements. A reoccurring example of this in Risitć’s work is the combining of the “real” and the “fake”, like mixing acrylic fur with patent leather, bones with glitter and the photograph next to its original content. Media is therefore also used as a layer. The pieces she fabricates become the subjects of still life photography, video and audio works. Through this process she is able to import demonstrably material and palpable objects into a digital sphere. By doing so a dialog is created between the virtual realm and the concrete. It also develops a creative system that generates new creations that further layer upon each other in continuum.
