PERSEPHONE’S GARDEN – Exhibition of paintings by KATARINA ŽUTIĆ at the eighth Kontakt

PERSEPHONE’S GARDEN
Hands That Create Deeds
Exhibition of paintings by KATARINA ŽUTIĆ at the eighth Kontakt
Dorćol Platz, Dobračina 59b, Belgrade
From March 19th to April 8th, 2024.

Persephone is a dual goddess. She is also known as Kore.
She is the ruler of the Underworld, but also the goddess of vegetation, bringing spring and rich harvests to the world.

KATARINA ŽUTIĆ is an artist who is exhibiting her paintings for the first time in Belgrade using a mixed technique.
In search of her style, she experimented with acrylics, watercolors, and mixed media. In her works, which are not watercolors, collage can often be noticed as something characteristic of her expression.
She graduated from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, department of acting, and later pursued a master’s degree in directing. She creates collage papers from her used acting scripts.
She had a band called Kamikaze, where she played bass guitar and sang her songs.
So far, she has exhibited landscapes in watercolor, with the desire to decentralize and affirm cultural events outside the capital, and has successfully held solo exhibitions under the collective title “My Climate Menu Change” in three cycles:
Summer and Autumn cycle, Cultural Center “Srbobran” on October 17, ’22.
Winter cycle, Gallery of the Cultural Center “Zlatibor” on March 11, ’23.
Spring cycle, Cultural Center “Kovin” on June 13, ’23.
These exhibitions had a clear message of preserving nature’s strength and beauty in the form of scenes of natural beauty, as well as the consequences that come from neglecting one’s environment in the form of post-apocalyptic scenes of wastelands and destroyed barren lands.
She has been drawing and painting her whole life, using whatever materials were available to her. However, in the last five years, she decided to dedicate herself to it completely. She has completed numerous painting courses. She has created her studio, where she held workshops. She experimented with landscapes, abstraction, and this time, she presents herself through surrealism using a mixed technique.

According to mythology, Persephone can be attributed to the change of seasons, as she spends half of the year in the world of the living, while the other half she spends in the Underworld, the realm of the dead. These are the motifs that guided me on my journey to reach the paintings that are part of this exhibition.
On a personal level, Persephone is the daughter of the supreme ruler of Olympus, Zeus, and his wife Demeter. Among many suitors for Persephone’s hand, Hades found a solution on how to marry her. The ruler of the Underworld, with Zeus’s permission, abducted Persephone from Demeter, her mother, married her, and took her to rule the underworld together with him.
She is torn between her obligations to her husband and marital vows on one hand, and love for her mother and the beginning of life she brings to the earth on the other. I recognize this tornness as a creator who has many ideas and often struggles to fulfill everything she has set for herself, while time constantly slips through her fingers, and “the underworld” awaits us all just around the corner, but it seems comforting to me if Persephone welcomes us there. In her, I see a connection between those of us who live and our deceased…
Trees are there when we are born because otherwise, we couldn’t be born – there would be no air. They silently observe our, for them, short lives, and when we die, their roots embrace us. What if the purpose of our bodies after death is simply fertilizer for the earth from which trees grow? I see this as a clear link between the material and the spiritual world. This thought often haunts me.
I believe that every tree has its roots in one of our ancestors, and I personally believe that trees, on some metaphysical level, are a symbol that connects life and death, two opposing and inseparable ideas.
Hands are a motif that runs through all the paintings along with trees, and in this way, I tried to emphasize the power we humans have to do something great and good. The power to collectively stop destruction, not only of the achievements of civilization but also of the nature in which we live.
Finally, the garden. A concept with strong semiotics.
In many religions, primarily in Christianity, the garden is depicted as a beautiful afterlife filled with blessings. How come we are not aware of the beauty and strength of the garden of nature in which we live here and now?
Most often, we poison and destroy that garden of our life. Do we know that the Garden of Eden – the garden where we can live on earth? We can, but only if we preserve it, nurture it, and tirelessly water it. Let’s start with our spiritual nature, and we will reach the nature that feeds and surrounds us.
Katarina Žutić
Exhibition Author