Ivana Bašić b. 1986

Ivana Bašić (b. 1986, Belgrade) lives and works in New York, USA. Bašić's work examines material and metaphysical bounds of humanity. Each sculpture combines specific materials — glass, wax, bronze, stone, stainless steel, oil paint — into a symbolic material codex, consistent across the artist’s practice. Bašić’s work contemplates the disintegration of the body and the material world — not as a loss but as a moment of radical potential: a passage from subjectivity to communion; human to non-human; from form-bound and limited to formless and limitless.

Bašić received her bachelor’s degree from Belgrade University and her master’s degree from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Recent solo exhibitions of the artist’s work have taken place at Albion Jeune, London (2025); Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade (2025); MO.CO., Montpellier (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2024); François Ghebaly, New York (2022); November Gallery, Belgrade (2018); Marlborough Contemporary, New York (2017); and Annka Kultys Gallery, London (2016). The artist participated in group exhibitions held at Albion Jeune, London (2025); Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin (2023); Lafayette Anticipations, Paris (2023); Francesca Minini Gallery, Milan (2022); Anonymous Gallery, New York (2022); Someday Gallery, New York (2022); Galerie du Monde, Hong Kong (2022); National Gallery Prague (2021); Museum of Art and Design at Miami Dade College (2020); Lyles & King, New York (2020); Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2020); Athens Biennal, Athens (2018); Belgrade Biennial, Belgrade (2018); and Hessel Museum of Art, Annendale- On-Hudson (2017), among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum, New York. She has participated in the Fourteenth Taipei Biennial, Whispers on the Horizon in 2025.

Whispers on the Horizon, 14th Taipei Biennial, November 2025 - March 2026

Metempsychosis, Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, Serbia, 2025

The pronounced perforation of forms follows the artist’s internal impulses, with her treatment of material emphasizing the expressive and psychological tension of the work, provoking sensations of deep unease and existential reflection. Created in media such as wax, glass, resin, stainless steel, bronze, and alabaster, Bašić’s hybrid forms evoke fluid, biomechanical bodies inhabiting the threshold between the empirical and the metaphysical. The figures that populate her imaginary are not human: they are chimerical, part insectoid, part mechanical, permeated by multiple perforated structures that imbue the works with a distinct otherworldly quality.

At the core of Bašić’s practice lies a profoundly personal testimony of war, exile, and the collective trauma of the Balkans in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Through a posthumanist lens, she interrogates the ways in which pressure and destruction shape not only the tissue of the body but subjectivity itself. With fragile forms, the vulnerability of the living organism in a state of existential tension, but also its defiant resilience and resistance to death, Bašić simultaneously anticipates the collapse and tragedy of an era, the grotesque of war, and the disintegration of the human in both image and form. Yet, in her sculptures, brutality and vulnerability meet without hierarchy; beauty is found in distortion, tenderness in violence, as the artist dissolves the dichotomy between the sublime and the monstrous. Bašić’s chthonic entities, inspired by the concept of sympoiesis (collective creation), are not autonomous but emerge through merging with the Other, through the loss of form and the embrace of the unknown. In this register, the artist does not create figurative representations but rather alchemical entities that actively undergo a process of somatic-spiritual transmutation—a visualized rhythm of existence. This is a space between control and surrender, between the interior of the body and its physical boundaries, between energetic connectivity and aesthetic sublimation, representing a radical act of liberation from linear time, origin, and causality. Ivana Bašić’s ability to powerfully and convincingly articulate deeply emotional, instinctual, and psychic states of experience, emergence, and dissolution within the field of life renders these profoundly evocative figures primal, timeless, and universal.

Metempsychosis, MO.CO Montpellier Contemporain, Montpellier, France, 2025

Metempsychosis took the form of a rite of passage, a spatial journey that questions the material and metaphysical boundaries of humanity. Featuring more than twenty works, the exhibition brought together sculptures, drawings, video, and a seven-meter-long robotic altarpiece. The experience invited the audience on a surreal journey where the dissolution of bodies and the material world was not seen as a loss, but as the emergence of radical potential. The works of Ivana Bašić, born in 1986 in Yugoslavia, are strongly influenced by the experience of war, violence, and brutality that, following the collapse of her native country, ended up marking her childhood. Certain ontological obsessions then become urgent: the frangibility of the human condition; the crisis of the Self and the Other; the possibility of reimagining life and death; the quest for immortality. Bašić’s hybrid bodies propose metamorphosis as a substitute for escape, whether on an individual or collective scale: when there is nowhere left to hide, can transformation be the solution?

At nearly human-scale, each of Bašić’s sculptures is made from a variety of materials—wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster—which together construct the artist’s symbolic and material language. Her forms evoke uterine fluids and insect bodies. These figures are simultaneously violent and tender, evoking both subterranean and invisible primordial forces. The title of the exhibition refers to its central piece, the seven-metre-long Passion of Pneumatics (2024), which takes inspiration from images of the Italian Renaissance and the depiction of the Immaculate Heart of the Virgin Mary. Here, the sunbeams of the Immaculate Heart are replaced by pneumatic hammers that progressively pound a stone, attempting to reduce the heart of the sculpture to dust. Using the force of compressed air, the repetitive movements of the hammers are synchronised with the cadence of the artist’s breathing, evoking the Gnostic idea of Pneuma, which stands for both “breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In Gnostic teachings, the Pneumatics represented the highest order of beings—those fuelled by the spirit, the “breath of life”—that transcend the purely materialistic realm.

Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics, Schinkel Pavillon, 7 June - 1 September 2024

A storm cut through the Schinkel Pavillon’s historic building as clouds of dust wandered across the first institutional solo exhibition of Ivana Bašić. Progressing like a rite of passage through both floors of Schinkel’s iconic octagonal halls, Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics presented sculptures, video, drawings, and a large-scale pneumatic centerpiece in Bašić’s poetic, deeply nuanced material language. Charged by the artist’s childhood experiences of war, violence, brutality, and physical entrapment during the collapse of her native Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Bašić’s humanoid sculptures address sweeping themes of intergenerational trauma, post-humanist feminism, and the quest for immortality, but these far-reaching subjects are refracted through the disarmingly tender bodies in her work, clinging to support structures such as pipes and prosthetics that hold them in place.

In the center of the exhibition sat a seven-meter-wide, site-specific sculpture that took up the entire first-floor hall. At the core of this sculpture, between two large lobes of glass, small pneumatic metal hammers were gradually pounding an alabaster stone into dust—merging with the floating clouds of dust already inhabiting the exhibition space. Driven by air-pressure, the hammers’ repetitive movements are timed to the cadence of the artist’s breath, evoking the Gnostic idea of the Pneuma,”breath” and “spirit” in Greek. In the teachings of Gnosticism, the Pneumatics were the highest order of beings—those powered by the “breath of life”, the spirit that transforms beyond the material realm.

On the ground floor visitors were invited to explore more figures in different states of transformation, accompanied by drawings that evoke womb-like forms, nebulaes and cellular life, as if the sculptures have been birthed within them. In several sculptures, flesh-colored folds of skin are surrounded by shiny plates of bronze armor, seemingly to protect their tender flesh.

At once tender and violent, each of Bašić’s hand-made sculptures combine vastly disparate materials-—wax, glass, bronze, stainless steel, and alabaster—into figures approximately human in scale, evoking human skin, womb fluids, and insect bodies, all of which are in the process of transformation or dissolution.

Fixed to the ceilings and floors, or crawling into the walls, to be protected from the violence of the oncoming storm, the figures in Metempsychosis: The Passion of Pneumatics gradually shift into a disembodied state, ultimately freeing themselves from their forms, and turning into ethereal dust.