Irena Pejčić portrays intimacies. The artist depicts stories about the fragile, irretrievable, past. Moments that slip through our fingers, memories shaped by emotion, trauma, vulnerability. Through her artistic practice, Pejčić gives form to absence, loss, and the nuances of the human condition. Her sculptures and performances are meditations on time, embodiment, and the interplay between personal and collective memory.
 
Pejčić’s working method is rooted in Body Art. The representation of the body serves as both medium and message. She places the body spatially and sculpturally at the centre of her work, creating installations and objects that invite physical and emotional resonance. By turning the body into an object of reflection, she reverses conventional perspectives and challenges viewers to confront the immediacy and vulnerability of corporeal existence.
 
Her work is deeply performative. Movement, gesture, and material all contribute to a unique visual language. This performative quality forms the core of Pejčić’s artistic signature, which is characterized by a strong sense of recognition. Her use of repetition, subtle variation, and physical imprints links her work to ritual and memory. She primarily works with plaster. A material that captures the fragile and ephemeral nature of her subjects. Plaster allows her to freeze moments, to preserve impressions, and to thematize the broken. Cracks, voids, and imperfections are not hidden but embraced. In this way, her sculptures confront not only the viewer but also the social and political realities from which they emerge.
 
Pejčić’s biography is inseparable from her artistic approach. She currently lives and works in Vienna, Austria. She was born in Yugoslavia, now Bosnia-Herzegovina. She came to Austria at the age of two. Escaping a region marked by war, displacement, and complex historical narratives. Growing up in the tension between a war-torn homeland and the safety of a new country shaped her view and continues to influence her work. Pejčić’s art becomes a space in which these antagonisms meet. Trauma and healing, loss and belonging, fragility and resilience.

© Jolly Schwarz