Marija Zdravković (Belgrade, 1980) is a Serbian painter who discovered her passion for painting at the age of 23. She graduated in painting in 2010 from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in the class of Professor Slobodan Roksandić. She is currently pursuing doctoral studies in painting at the same faculty.
She has held multiple solo exhibitions in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Ruma, and Niš. She is a member of the Association of Fine Artists of Serbia (ULUS) and lives and works in Belgrade.
In 2016, she participated in the GloArt residency program in Lanaken, Belgium. She also collaborated as an assistant to Norwegian artist Liv Kristin Holmberg on the performances The Lost Humanity and Les Tenebre, which were staged in Norway from 2012 to 2018. In 2014, she participated in the Cinema Vérité International Documentary Film Festival in Tehran as a collaborator of Norwegian editor Truls Lie. She also worked as an assistant and collaborator on the 2014 documentary film Significance of Freedom.
Her most recent works focus on floral motifs, a subject that has inspired painters for centuries. Across the ages, the beauty, uniqueness, and symbolism of flowers have been closely tied to time and transience. In her latest cycle, a noticeable shift in painterly approach appears, using flowers as symbols or metaphors to express her emotions.
As Milan Ristić, curator at the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Arts in Niš, describes in his text on her cycle titled “Flowers as a Motif in the Paintings of Marija Zdravković”:
"Marija Zdravković’s flower paintings are open to impressions and interpretations, yet they carry the mark of manual creation, process, and the artist’s personal emotional involvement. Her exhibition offers an opportunity to explore flowering and all that it may signify. The life potential of the motif—from budding to withering and decay, the cyclical rhythm of activity and hibernation, day and night, life and death—reflects the encompassing continuity of nature in both material and spiritual terms. The floral motif thus becomes a long-term focus for Marija Zdravković’s work. This perspective may condition a restrained approach to reality, or, conversely, an intense desire to seize the moment of existence. The certainty of flowering and the uncertainty of perception are references to the global present."
