Petar Smiljanic was born in Valjevo, Serbia in 1985. He graduated from Faculty of Architecture in 2009 in Belgrade, Serbia. After he finished master in Architecture he was working in several international companies. He showed passion about painting in his early age learning from his father who is engaged to this art. He is currently based in Belgrade, where in parallel to his job as an architect he strives to express his passions on canvas. He had his first solo show 2016 in Belgrade and in last two years he exhibited his paintings internationally in London, Paris, Tokyo and Shenzhen.
Petar Smiljanic
Artist Statement
'Human Arch – Scapes' is a series of paintings that interpret the human figure as building block of architectural cityscape. Using various levels of abstraction and experimenting with the scale artist develops a dialog in which the human is simultaneously city’s creator and destroyer of it's physical and social ecosystems. Knowledge, sense of space perspective as well as digital media techniques derived from his architectural background help him create a unity of the human and the city in a contextual heterogeneous matrix. For artist context depending on the place, current interests and emotions, that he is exploring in the process of painting.
‘Human City – Scapes’ series showing existence and presence in the city. How does city becomes destroyer of human, or it is inevitable that we will destroy each other. We create city and city create ‘’urbanites’’ with different moral, ethical and personal values.
‘Portrait Arch – Scapes’ is a series of paintings (on canvas) that questioning how deep is our mind and how vulnerable is our soul. What we see when we look deep inside our mind behind the barriers that is already known. What are we afraid of and what we can learn about ourselves when we see the self-reflection?