Under the Same Sun

"Under the Same Sun" is an exhibition bringing together works by Mihaela Rašica made over the past three years, chiefly paintings from the three cycles that have most strongly marked her practice in that period. The first is "Gozba!" (Feast!, 2023), which was also her graduation project at the Teaching Department of the Academy of Fine Arts — a cycle of twelve oil paintings on canvas and six white-glazed ceramic jug sculptures, presented in a solo exhibition at the Kranjčar Gallery in June 2023. Thematically, "Gozba!" deals with the unthinging of things, the phrase with which Antun Branko Šimić, in his 1919 essay "Muzika forma", describes the artist's way of looking at things: seen differently, seen again, things shed their learned function and appear in their original, full light — strange and beautiful. The second cycle is "Geneza" (Genesis, 2024), tied to her second graduation project, at the Painting Department. In that period the artist was concerned above all with how to paint, in contrast to "Gozba!", where the question was what to paint — so it is no surprise that the subject of the works was itself genesis: becoming, forming, emerging. In these paintings the protagonists expand within the very space of the picture, vulnerably absorbing the impressions around them and taking external sources of light into their expanding form. Or else, as in the painting "U dobroj poplavi sunca" (In a Good Flood of Sun), they gather inwards, in an act of introspective living-through of the impressions they have just absorbed. The third cycle, "Nebo iznad Dubrovnika" (Sky Above Dubrovnik), is the first subject the artist took up after finishing the Academy, prepared for a museum exhibition in her native city. She began with the family photo album, painting the scenes broadly, in watercolour. Watching those fields spread and disappear, she realised that this is how memory works, and that memory allows one to dwell and move within it for a while. Out of that dwelling and moving came a river of images and scenes from her childhood. The cycle took two years, from the autumn of 2024 to the spring of 2026, when the exhibition moved to Zagreb. When these different works are placed side by side, the same atmosphere and tension can be recognised in all of them: bodies and objects stretched from edge to edge of the canvas or condensed into the tissue of abstracted colouristic forms, always in a simultaneous relation of drawing away from and towards — the sun.