Art is my life. Even as a boy I was in love with scientifically fanatical films, music, paintings by Edvard Munch, Salvador Dali and Gothic and Baroque sculptures. I grew up in a peaceful place surrounded by nature and its wild beauty. I started sculpting plasticine sculptures very early, making superheroes and other fictional characters every day, simply my imagination exploded. It was a wonderful period.
I decided to enroll in secondary art school, where I studied painting techniques and after graduation I enrolled in the classical Art Academy and graduated as an academic sculptor. After the academy, the expressionist style was dominant in my paintings and sculptures and it set certain limits for me to express myself the way I imagined. As someone who was inspired by the philosophy of existentialism and psychology, I started to create works that I was quite satisfied with, but something was missing, and that was my love to science. I wanted to deal with issues of space, time, human spirit and metaphysics.
I started traveling around Europe wanting to explore and see as many of my favorite artists live as possible. So in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands and Italy, I came into contact with Gothic, neoclassicism, expressionism and surrealism, and that is what inspired me in a technical sense, because I wanted my works to have these elements. Since I am a figurative artist, I wanted to keep in my works a figure surrounded by imaginary space of symbolism and philosophy; I want to give different perspective. Then I realized that I am actually a surrealist and that is the field where I can best express myself. I went back to my boyhood days to pick my love of science fiction and cyberpunk movies to combine it with the current perception.
As my interests and researches grew, philosophy became more and more involved as a very important element, and that's how I came to the criticism of transhumanist ideas. While I was in Belgium as part of the art program, my ideas crystallized and after returning to my homeland, I started the „Genesis” cycle, which is of great importance to me personally because it was actually a clear picture of the path my art and style should take.
My art has been awarded several times in the country and abroad, and in 2022 I received an award for the best sculptural work in contemporary art in my country, which gave me even more energy to continue my work and artistic research.
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Marko Chakalovic