Daniela Fulgosi: The Measure of Survival

Over the past twenty years and within the domain of drawing, printmaking, collage and art books, Daniela Fulgosi has been exploring the pared-down exquisiteness and expressiveness of paper. In her latest works, featured in the exhibition “The measure of survival”, the artist explores the deceptive lightness of the autonomy of life, emotion, existence. Works titled “Surrender”, “Traitor”, “Consequences”, “At the end” or “Absence” speak of the life deeply felt and recorded with outstanding visual delicacy. 
 
To her overarching method of deconstruction of everyday cultural production of images, evident in the earlier series of collages “Body Map" (2002) and “The Tyrant’s Tyrant" (2014), Fulgosi now brings an additional dimension of drawing, further extending the spectrum of almost-white spaces first initiated by her series "Remains and Vazareli "(2014). A look at her earlier collages reveals a continuing interest in the self-reflective body, materiality, the process of construction and deconstruction, quotes and references, as well as human relationships.  “The measure of survival” adds the newly found fragility and sensuality created from the sense of impermanence: a new text in which the broken line divides the space into before and after, whereas the drawings denote the here and now. 
 
The archival, almost forensic approach to photography and collage led by selection, collection and classification (by colour, shape, shadow of its fragments) of her earlier collage studies is here succeeded by a space entirely governed by different laws. The collages ”Health" and "Surrender" are similar (and almost synonymous) in their recognition of the close ties between the physical and psychic spaces which can never be fully understood or reconstructed by the image, the spaces through which the protagonist-author passes deeply aware of their absurdities and illogicalities. "End of Time", "Consequences", "Release" offer the intimate studies of controlled pain, the poetics of an author who is both the text and the one nourished by reading of it. These frail forms and directions could easily fade or be reorganised into different states, as indicated by the appearance and disappearance of the script, and the balance between creation and contemplation. 
 
Daniela Fulgosi (Zemun, 1967) works in the domain of drawing, printmaking, collage and art books. She graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 1991, where she completed her postgraduate studies in 1995. She has been a member of ULUS since 1992, and has since had 23 solo and over 250 group exhibitions. Daniela is a recipient of 14 awards for printmaking, drawing and art books (1992, 2013, International Golden Feather of Belgrade, 1997 Award of the October Salon for Graphics, 1997 Award of the III Belgrade Biennale of Drawings and Small Plastics (for drawing), 2001 The Great Seal of the Graphic Collective ; 2004 Golden ULUS Needle, among others). Her works are in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, the city of Belgrade and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia. She works as a full-time professor at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, where she lives.