In this body of work, Hafizovic’s (ha FEE zo vitch’s) interest lies at the moment where the secular or natural becomes transcendental: her work reveals figures engaged in spiritual and sometimes sexual activity in loose landscapes, along with flowers and religious vessels which, for her, symbolize the power of beauty and engagement. Inspired by William Blake and managed with a contemporary artistic physicality, Halfizovic starts with the idea that the imagination is divine, and attempts to involve the viewer in the creative act directly. Through her often-elusive, or raw representations she believes the viewer should “struggle” – use his or her imagination – to experience the work, as she did in the making of a piece.

The paintings in this exhibition cover a range of Hafizovic’s vocabularies, but like a church (or a gallery or museum) with its artifacts and preserved visual histories, the work is intended to reveal a singular mythology. In the piece Cleft an object that appears as amorphous matter floats through space. The painting’s warm tones and organic form in combination with dynamic brushstrokes and splashes simultaneously suggests landscape and figure. For Hafizovic, this is a reference to the past or a spirit – things that are understood as both present and absent. Another piece on a vertical canvas is painted with wide brush strokes of thickly painted colors in gray tones with random drips running down from more thinly painted layers. Barely emerging from the surface are loose outlines of intertwined bodies that seem as if they could be cherubs, or gods, friends or lovers reassuring both the painter and the viewer of their creators’ place in a dramatic universe.

Selma Hafizovic was born in the former Yugoslavia, and raised in Southern California. She graduated from SVA in 2005 with a BFA, and has exhibited in group exhibitions in New York. This is her second solo exhibition at V&A.