About

Duška Julius is a Mexican artist of Yugoslavian origins living in Canada. Her work is a reflection of a cosmopolitan upbringing harnessing many distinct cultural and artistic experiences. In her paintings she uses elements that bring us closer to the cosmos, the human condition, and the never ending bond with nature--giving us a moment of introspection; helping us heal the alienation we feel in a world we have deeply changed and affected. Her art is crafted with powerful movement, combining the abstract and figurative. Rainbows seem to explode and colors burst into monochromatic hues; oil and sand giving birth to textures that are delicate and spontaneous. Let yourself be immersed into an intense experience.

What other critics said about her work: 

The Art of Duška Julius

In the contemporary world of art there are almost no boundaries. Between the abstract and the figurative lies the current language of creativity, which represents an eternal challenge for artists in their search for authentic expression. Laboriously, they experiment with new and ancient techniques and they try to manifest emotions and concepts through lines, textures, colours, composition, volume and the synchronous use of light and shade.

Duška Julius was born, of Yugoslavian origins, in Mexico. She proudly carries the heritage of a cultural inheritance that stems from many roots. She identifies herself artistically with precolonial mural art, German expressionism, and the figurative abstraction of Rufino Tamayo often called 'Mexicanism' All these confluent and merge harmoniously when the abstract elements meet the figurative and symbolic, like sheet over sheet of rainbow coloured layers and monochromatic hues. One can appreciate the complex yet delicate textures that she achieves mixing sand with oil. Their captivating transparencies transport us to eras long gone. One of her favourite themes are the 'binomials' the human couple that keep the nocturnal canvases awake and transport us to a sensual and clearly erotic world sometimes reminiscent of Richard Lindner.

One can easily recognize a citizen of the world, who in her core carries her European and Latin-american cultural heritage. Her artistic constant I would say is the intellectual and creative pursuit of diurnal and ethereal elements, swaying between the analytical, mystical and the sensual is the fascinating oeuvre of Duška Julius.

A. Rivera de Varona, Miami, Fla. USA

Environment and memory

Every artist is like a river of memory–if not a fountain of experience. One can also translate visual recognizance of dreams, the essence of desire and the texture of the oblivion we seek into artistic creation.

As decisive as that emotional memory is the environment, air, sounds that arise from it and change by the hour. In the case of Duška Julius it is the inner space she inhabits. It seems to circumference her with the fabric of something that has a voice of its own. And as she confesses to me, working at night in that space is even more suiting for her work 'because that's when you most hear the silence drowned in music'.

Fascinated by what can't be expressed with precision but can be intuited (since she attended astrophysics classes in Germany), for this Mexican artist of Yugoslavian origins, the night with the cosmos it holds–is as vast as the human couple which is a recurrent theme.

This is an oeuvre rich in heritage and homage–it resonates of Rufino Tamayo and Rene Portocarrero–full of symbols that capture little things: plants, cactus, flowers, reptiles but also the complexities of the human condition and its ambush on the universe in canvases like 'Andromeda'.

Abstract and figurative, desertic and fluvial, her paintings are incendiary with the sharpest hues of blue, that submerge the bodies of a 'binomial' protected by the sun and stars in their heads. Such as in her painting entitled 'Romance', a canvas that evokes the poet Octavio Paz, who describing the paintings of Rufino Tamayo wrote: 'It's in all of his paintings, visible and invisible because even the night is nothing but a carbonized sun.'

If a canvas can be described as the space between our bodies and our gaze we have to ask: 'Does our vision precede the object? Or is it the object that triggers visions?' Any attempt to form an answer is sterile in the field of art, that for the same reason remains fertile for questions.

In this oeuvre there is another element not to be suborned and that is tension: some kind of electric cable, an eel, a lash in the mirror. And when we spectators feel that in a canvas - then we have reached that other shore.

ClaudIa Hernandez de Valle Arizpe, Mexico City, Mexico