Three Blue Swirls

Dragica grew up in Zagreb, and earned her BA and MFA, Painting, at The Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. The painter is the recipient of the prestigious 2009 Abbey Painting Award, sponsored by the British Academy, which led to the artist residency and Fellowship at the British School in Rome. Dragica’s work has been commissioned for high end projects worldwide.

“As a painter, I’m in a flux of relentless searching. Through painting, I can access the plane of being where my intensely conscious mind reaches the unconscious stillness. Here, there is a different kind of world, and from there my work unfolds.” 

Dragica Carlin is known for her large-scale abstract paintings characterized by the presence of gestural swirls of paint that appear like heavy clouds of colour − in constant movement across the canvas. Each sublime orchestration of shifting form arises from the artist’s ongoing experimentation with the physicality of paint, the brush’s course readable and at the same time creating an abstract reverie of meaning.
In Dragica’s paintings, the iconic repeating forms of the swirl represents the idea of continual flux and transformation, building on multiple representations within layers of paint, an ode to the interconnectedness of the universe. Within these paintings, the artist intends these forms to represent the “essence of being” symbolic of the transcendental side of being. The sense of constant flux expresses a sense of invisible yet powerful energy, and an “inconceivable world.”
Committed to the materiality of the painting process, Dragica shares that much of the final result of her practice is left to chance, the colour, pattern and sense of movement unfold within the moment of making, the act of painting an act of becoming. It is within this way of working that a prismatic stillness emerges.