Pays-Bas – Amsterdam
The Dutch-Croatian photographer transports us to another world through her surreal, dreamlike, colour-saturated images for a temporary escape from reality.
Mysterious self-portraits, desolate landscapes and vibrant colours, Sanja Marušić’s photographs are pure wonder. This 32-year-old Amsterdam-based virtuoso has been making a name for herself on the art scene in recent years.
Her portfolio invites us into a parallel world that she painstakingly shapes through her many travels. This fashion photography alumnus from the Royal Academy in The Hague has an experimental, multidisciplinary approach to the medium, manipulating both digital and painting/collage techniques. Her stagings plunge us into surreal settings, bathed in bright colours, with imaginative costumes and a body geometry born of the performances she choreographs herself.
While Soviet art of the 1930s is one of her favourite periods, she also draws influences from Polish, Russian and Mexican painters, as well as embroidery and object painting. The result is a series of enigmatic, personal visual narratives dealing with intimacy, love, couples, motherhood, escapism and the search for balance in human relationships.
Majestic Bodies and Worlds
Sanja Marušić sets off in search of places that inspire her and drive her to abstract human forms. Take “Eutierria”, for example. This series depicts her honeymoon, contorting her body and that of her husband to form hybrid beings with multiple limbs. In this blend of digital and (body) painting, she creates a surreal unity through these “temporary statues”, in which she explores balance, union, abandonment to each other and to nature. But also, the search for calm and connection in the midst of movement.
For “Before You”, the photographer documents her pregnancy, examining the body and the woman in transition. Her belly, breasts and undulating silhouette mark this happy change, embracing the geometry of the colour-saturated background. As for “Sasha and Sanja”, she evokes her motherhood. “I love it when art is an autonomous world that allows the viewer to enter an artist’s head,” she confesses.
© Sanja Marušić, With You Part2
Her work has appeared in major international magazines, such as the New York Times, and has been exhibited at the Musée Van Gogh and Paris Photo. In 2023, Sanja Marušić published her second book (but this time with a publisher) and presented her first solo exhibition, “Out of This World,” at the Netherlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam, which shows all the emotional power of this artist to watch.
Nathalie Dassa