Gala Čaki: The Landscape of the Inner Self

Gala Čaki: The Landscape of the Inner Self
21 March–26 April 2025
MMC KIBLA/KiBela

You are cordially invited to the opening of the solo exhibition The Landscape of the Inner Self by the painter Gala Čaki, which will take place on Friday, 21 March 2025, at 7 p.m. in the KiBela, space for art.

Gala Čaki’s works are bursting with energy, as if the artist is pouring her inner self onto the canvases that radiate the artist's creative expression. She channels intense personal emotions into painting with decisive yet refined and gentle brushstrokes, which she executes so vehemently that her approach could also be described as ambient performance or action painting.

She comes from Novi Sad in Vojvodina, which with its multiethnicity is the most multicultural city in Serbia. Her paintings draw on the tradition of the urban environment and reflect it on the global level of the intimate feelings of an individual in a metropolis. Figures with hinted features, veiled and unrecognizable, appear in an abstract environment as images of what we have experienced in our time. Although they may be familiar, they convey a strong sense of the unknown and it is uncertain whether we have ever actually encountered them. But they must have appeared in some form, perhaps as mere apparitions, somewhere between the unconscious and the conscious, the actual, the realized, between personal feelings and experiences that belong only to us and remain unknown to others. But in Gala Čaki's artworks, they are visually transformed into the universal.

Somewhere on the city streets which force people into interpersonal relationships, and through a discerning attitude towards the world around us, our inner world emerges, with which we construct relationships between ourselves and others which are the basis of society and the social. Just as communication is a medium for bridging distances on a personal and group level and between meanings, art is a universal “form” of traversing between outer and inner spaces – at first opaque and enigmatic, they then take on a recognizable form which we can call “emotional intelligence” and which is an inevitable result of human progress, the very essence of (human) being.

The subtlety, fragility and introversion of Gala Čaki is simply transformed in her paintings into figurative abstractions that create images of people we have met, even if we have never met them, but they are present in us and we can still stumble upon them or they remain in that “in-between space” which creates the awareness of the individual and collective unconscious through art.

Biography

Gala Čaki was born on March 19, 1987 in Ečka, Serbia. She completed primary and secondary school in Zrenjanin, Serbia. In 2006, she enrolled at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, where she received her master’s degree in painting and drawing in 2011. She continued her doctoral studies at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, where she graduated in 2017. Since 2014, she has been a member of the international organization Art Link Us based in Ehime, Japan. Gala’s artistic research focuses on fantastic painting and ambient performance of works of art. She is the founder of Gala International Art Symposium in Serbia, in which more than 30 major artists from all over the world have participated. Her works have been exhibited in China, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore, Russia, India, Qatar, Dubai, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Romania, Slovenia, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Croatia, America, Canada and Mexico.

https://galacaki.com/

CV Gala Čaki (PDF)

< Gala Čaki: The Blue Man, oil on linen canvas, 2023; photo: Aleksandar Ramadanović

MMC KIBLA/KiBela, Ulica kneza Koclja 9, Maribor
Opening hours: Monday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.