Ivana Bašić b. 1986

Overview

Ivana Bašić (b. 1986, Belgrade) lives and works in New York, USA. Her work addresses the vulnerability and transformation of the body and human matter. By using different materials (such as wax, glass, steel, alabaster, oil paint) and combining these with technique and immaterial matters (such as breath, pressure and rigidity), the sculptures acquire a posthuman quality. The colours she chooses refer strongly to the human body. Pink, white and natural combinations are reminiscent of blood, bone and flesh.

Bašić received her bachelor’s degree from Belgrade University and her master’s degree from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at Albion Jeune, London (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2025); MO.CO., Montpellier (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2024); François Ghebaly, New York (2022); November Gallery, Belgrade (2018); Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2017); and Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2016). The artist participated in group exhibitions held at Albion Jeune, London (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023); Francesca Minini Gallery, Milan (2022); Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); Someday Gallery, New York (2022); Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2022); National Gallery Prague (2021); Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (2020); Lyles & King, New York (2020); Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Athens Biennal, Athens (2018); Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade (2018); and Hessel Museum of Art, Annendale- On-Hudson (2017), among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum, New York. She has participated in the Fourteenth Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon in 2025.

Download Artist's CV (PDF, opens in a new tab.)
Works
Exhibitions
- Base Materialism
  Ambera Wellmann, Cindy Ji Hye Kim, Fin Simonetti, Ivana Bašić, Rachel Rossin, Shuyi Cao, Shuo Hao 5 Jun - 30 Aug 2025
  
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- Temptation of Being
  Ivana Bašić 20 Feb - 17 Apr 2025
  
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Past work

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Ivana Bašić, Belay My Light, the Ground Is Gone (2018).
Photographed by Frank Sperling.
Courtesy of Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin.
© Albion Jeune and the artist.
Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics
Schinkel Pavillon, 7 June - 1 September 2024
A storm cuts through the Schinkel Pavillon’s historic building as clouds of dust wander across the first institutional solo exhibition of New York-based artist Ivana Bašić (b. 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia). Progressing like a rite of passage through both floors of Schinkel’s iconic octagonal halls, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics presents sculptures, video, drawings, and a large-scale pneumatic centerpiece in Bašić’s poetic, deeply nuanced material language.

Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.
In the center of the exhibition is a seven-meter-wide, site-specific sculpture that will take up the entire first-floor hall. At the core of this sculpture, between two large lobes of glass, small pneumatic metal hammers are gradually pounding an alabaster stone into dust — merging with the floating clouds of dust already inhabiting the exhibition space. Driven by air-pressure, the hammers’ repetitive movements are timed to the cadence of the artist’s breath, evoking the Gnostic idea of the Pneuma,”breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In the teachings of Gnosticism, the Pneumatics were the highest order of beings — those powered by the “breath of life”, the spirit that transforms beyond the material realm.

On the ground floor visitors are invited to explore more figures in different states of transformation, accompanied by drawings that evoke womb-like forms, nebulaes and cellular life, as if the sculptures have been birthed within them. In several sculptures, flesh-colored folds of skin are surrounded by shiny plates of bronze armor, seemingly to protect their tender flesh.
At once tender and violent, each of Bašić’s hand-made sculptures combine vastly disparate materials — wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster — into figures approximately human in scale, evoking human skin, womb fluids, and insect bodies, all of which are in the process of transformation or dissolution. Fixed to the ceilings and floors, or crawling into the walls, to be protected from the violence of the oncoming storm, the figures in Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics gradually shift into a disembodied state, ultimately freeing themselves from their forms, and turning into ethereal dust.

The exhibition is made possible with the generous support of Albion Jeune, Balkan Projects, Francesca Minini, Cusson Cheng, Yvan Vanmol and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
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