I am a researcher and art historian, also a dealer in fine art and an ques. I am here to talk to you about Alisa Teletovic and I must confess that I liked Alisa’s work almost straight away since I first saw her pain ngs at an exhibi on in the Wyndham Cultural Centre nearly five years ago. I felt that I had met with an extraordinary ar st, and one who was not afraid to paint a li le ‘outside the square’ and thankfully didn’t follow the main- stream, but was almost curiously metaphoric. Alisa’s work has remained vibrant, full of energy and very relevant and charisma c, yet also not without emo on or sensi vity.
Not surprisingly her pain ngs have a colourful vibrancy, which is frequently lacking by others in Australian scapes. I am here to tell you that ALISA TELETOVIC and HER WORKS ARE RELEVANT in Australian Art, ladies and gentlemen. Alisa Teletovic’s work can perhaps be classified as figura ve expressionism, with a touch of naive elements mixed in. It’s a style of pain ng that actually originated in Europe shortly before the First World War, and was imported and embraced in Australia a er the Second World War with an influx of promising ar st from the Balkans and Latvia. The movement springs from anxiety and knowledge of the loneliness that would prevail without means of communica ng ideas, emo ons and feelings through art, frequently during a war situa on.
Probably the best known movement in Australia were called “the An podean Movement” of the 1940’s and 1950’s (Sydney Nolan, Albert Tucker, Arnold Shore (co-founder of the George Bell School), John Perceval, Arthur Boyd, and women ar st Joy Hester, Danilla Vassilieff and Eva Kubbos) and its off spring “the Angry Penguins”. Elements of expressionism are present in most art. They communicate informa on pertaining to the emo ons and feelings. One could say these feelings were detectable in ar sts of the Heidelberg School, when they used bright high-keyed colours and expressive brushwork in response to the landscape, and they documented an emo onal involvement into impressionism. A neo-expressionism has developed from the mid 1980’s. Since arriving as a resident in Australia from Bosnia nearly a decade ago, Alisa Teletovic has developed a strong sense of empathy with certain kinds of landscapes – anempathy, that is constantly evolving – pieces of the whole environment embodied with emo ons and feelings, rather than being inert, meaning without power.
This exhibi on, which presents the ar st’s recent body of works, is her personal explora on of Australia as her new homeland and a mixture of feelings between her past and current life. Alisa is evolving ideas and has developed the skills of expressing these. Alisa’s philosophy is that the first impulse of the ar s s to obtain pleasure in the crea on and secondly in making that pleasure intelligible to others.
The ar st’s crea ve vision has an inner consistency, which is born out of her struggle with something power- fully ‘other’ and is an expression of an intensely personal obsession. AlisaTeletovic’s colour explora ons and iconography are very relevant in today’s turbulent world and in modern art, and I think that this ar st may well be somewhat pleasantly ahead of current art expression, but certainly at the forefront. In having had the privi- lege of viewing this young ar st’s work and themes on a number of occasions, I find her work remarkably chal- lenging and interes ng.
Bob Metselaar