Ivan Stojakovic

I was born in Belgrade – a cosmopolitan city at the time, in ex-Yugoslavia, which in my teens fell apart into separate nation states and transitioned from communism to capitalism. My early education was shaped by historical materialism – an ideology that advocates a religious belief in science and suggests a revolutionary unity of all people in the communist system…

Ironically, I descend from a lineage of 9 generations of Serbian Orthodox priests. The lineage ended with my grand grandfather during the time of WWII and the communist revolution, which banned all religious practices in the Balkans…

In my early 20’s, I immigrated to Canada and then to the USA – New York, where I currently live. As I naturally became interested in the relationship between land and identity, I also discovered a potential in painting to construct and deconstruct the ‘self’ in terms of environment and environment in terms of the ‘self’, from/to abstract reality.

-Ivan Stojakovic