Sharmila Nezovic

Sharmila Nezovic is an Australian-based, contemporary abstract painter and a live-art performance artist. She is most interested in the human spirit – its resilience and its fragility.

Her practice has become deeply involved with developing works that delve specifically into ‘cultural ecology’ and the urban condition. That is, in exploring the effects of the built environment on us and our senses, including also looking at the part we play in designing and constructing those spaces and in paving over the natural world.

The result is artworks that ultimately explore a very personal perspective that elicits social commentary – deconstructing the ‘beauty and the trauma,’ the design and decay of our all-pervasive and unyielding cityscapes.

Sharmila’s undergraduate studies were undertaken at the Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. She did her postgraduate Painting studies at the New York Studio School, Manhattan, USA, and she holds a Master of Creative Arts (MCA) Degree by Research from JCU, Queensland.

The art that has inspired her most ranges across disciplines – in particular, experimental dance (Pina Bausch), experimental music (John Cage), and avant-garde theatre (Antonin Artaud) – as well as the Abstract Expressionists (de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko, Newman).

Last year, Dr. Louise Martin-Chew, an acclaimed Australian arts writer, wrote:
“In the painted and collaged constructions Sharmila Nezovic… exposes the raw and abject status of … places, restoring their power to move us. Her materials honour the corners of our cities that have often cracked under … pressure …., to build an ecology of emotional responses that evoke and memorialise fragmented moments.”