On Wednesday, March 13, at 7 PM, the exhibition "Brutal Tenderness" by artists Katie Woznicki and Edita Kadirić was opened at the Oto Bihalji-Merin Salon of the Museum of Naive and Marginal Art (Nemanjina 3, III/10). This is the first exhibition in the new
exhibition cycle Dialogues, where artists from seemingly different artistic worlds — official/mainstream/academic art and the world of marginal/outsider/art brut art — meet. The Museum of Naive and Marginal Art aims to explore what emerges from this fusion through this cycle. The curator of the exhibition is Senka Latinović.

Edita Kadirić, through her restrained drawings, represents the eternal liminality of the female experience. The world of gentle and merciless youth, of girls in the process of transforming into women, after which nothing will ever be the same. This painful ritual of transition is depicted through unusual and disturbing combinations of human and animal bodies, or through the communication of deer, rabbits, and monkeys with girls; the animals seem to want to keep the girls in the world of childhood where this surreal communication is possible, where anything is possible, before they enter the world of serious interpersonal relationships, rationality, and the roles predetermined for them.
In Edita's expression, we see a confident, easy, and educated stroke that she masters sovereignly, but this drawing is not there just for us to admire the clarity and beauty of the execution. It is regularly smudged, stained, and dirty, brutally honest in the state it wishes to represent. By contrasting delicate pearls and barbed necklaces, stains reminiscent of blood and the solemn golden colors of Byzantine frescoes and icons, asexuality and sensuality, the otherworldly and the human, Kadirić builds an atmosphere of tense discomfort, but also a certain solemn sadness that seems to have always accompanied women on their life journeys.
Katie Woznicki creates eruptively. Her stroke is unrefined and unpredictable; it is unknown where her hand will lead her and what will emerge on the drawing over time. A state of a kind of trance and automatism takes her into the realms of the subconscious from which various forms are born. Sometimes these are abstract, spilled areas in which faces, animals, and objects are occasionally discerned. Other times, they are grotesque human figures in everyday interactions, deformed like the characters of comic book author Robert Crumb, engaging in absurd and comedic dialogues or monologues. Deeply personal inner states intertwine and alternate with sharp social commentary, which is reflected in the tongue-in-cheek titles of the works themselves.
In addition to drawings, Woznicki also creates hallucinatory tapestries/patchworks, which will serve at the exhibition as a passage from one world to another, a gateway through which the worlds of artists Kadirić and Woznicki intertwine. The exhibition will also feature music that Woznicki has been creating for many years through her authorial projects Amanita Dodola and KopyKat, through which she expresses the breadth of her interests and her connection to the Belgrade music underground.
The psychedelic visions of Katie Woznicki and the tactile fragility of Edita Kadirić, despite all the differences in approach, technique, and motif, carry a shared strength of uncompromising exposure. Without the intention to beautify their own inner turmoil and reflections, they show us painful places: personal, female, social, places of discomfort and misfit. Life is painful and brutal in its collision with our spirit and our body. Tenderness is the need to share that experience with others — to express feelings of one's own loneliness and lostness, but also to lessen the same feelings of an unknown individual through the realization that there is another who notices, feels, and goes through the same states.

Visits must be announced a day in advance via the email address info@mnmu.rs. The salon is open every working day from 10 AM
to 5 PM, and on Saturdays from 12 PM to 6 PM. The exhibition will be open to visitors until May 25, 2024.