ABOUT THE WORK

Transfixed

Mixed Media (Traditional Printmaking & Digital) 2026

Transfixed presents a seemingly stunned and watchful face emerging from a dense, blood-red surface. The exaggerated eyes immediately draw the viewer into a state of tension, but the image reveals itself slowly: what first appears to be a dark, open mouth is, upon closer inspection, the body of a dead crow. This visual displacement creates a quiet but unsettling juxtaposition between life and death, consciousness and stillness, expression and silence.The work relies on this delayed recognition, inviting the viewer to look beyond the immediate image and question what they are actually seeing. The face appears caught in a moment of shock, fear, or fascination, while the crow introduces an ambiguous presence that could be read as an encounter with death, grief, violence, or transformation. The saturated red palette and repetitive, elongated marks intensify the bodily quality of the surface, suggesting skin, wounds, rain, or something organic and deteriorating. Together, these elements create an image suspended between attraction and discomfort, asking the viewer to remain with the image long enough for its meaning to shift.

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She is also a co-founder and member of the editorial team of UMNIK, a student cultural magazine created by students and artists from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje, bringing together visual art, music, poetry, and writing.

Graduating from the Faculty of Fine Arts at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje in 2024, Mitkovska continues to develop a practice defined by experimentation and material curiosity. Across printmaking, photography, and digital processes, her work considers the image not as a fixed object, but as something capable of being altered, layered, broken, and continually transformed.

Sara Mitkovska

ARTWORK TITLE: "Transfixed "
Year: 2026

Medium: Mixed Media (Traditional Printmaking Digital), 6000 × 6000 cm

Sara Mitkovska is a visual artist, printmaker, and graphic designer from Kumanovo, North Macedonia, whose practice is rooted in traditional printmaking while extending into photography, illustration, graphic design, digital image-making, and video. Working across analogue and digital processes, Mitkovska explores the relationship between image, material, and transformation, with particular attention to texture, memory, identity, growth, and decay.

Central to her practice is an interest in the physical surface and the traces produced through artistic process. Through techniques including etching, aquatint, mezzotint, linocut, drypoint, soft ground, monotype, and combined processes, she experiments with the possibilities of the printing matrix itself. Rather than treating the matrix simply as a means toward a finished image, Mitkovska approaches it as an active material—one that can be altered, damaged, layered, and transformed.

This dialogue between control and accident is particularly present in her treatment of zinc plates, which she subjects to deliberate physical alteration. Scratches, marks, imperfections, and unexpected changes become part of the work’s visual language, allowing the material itself to carry traces of emotion, transformation, and time. The resulting images retain a distinctly tactile quality, where process and surface become inseparable from meaning.

Mitkovska also moves fluidly between physical and digital image-making. Prints, photographs, textures, and other analogue elements often become the foundation for digital manipulation and composition, allowing her to explore how an image can shift between material states while preserving traces of its original form.

Alongside her individual practice, Mitkovska has participated in exhibitions and multidisciplinary projects across North Macedonia. She has collaborated with fashion designer Hristijan Mladenovski on several projects between 2021 and 2023, contributing to visual preparation, photography, presentations, and production. In 2024, she completed a graphic design internship at Ridarec Content and Media, further developing her experience across print and digital communication.

ABOUT THE WORK

Where the Rainbow Ends

Oil on canvas, 2026

In Where the Rainbow Ends, Stefan Stoikov reimagines Hokusai’s The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, replacing its octopus with the monstrous presence of Cthulhu/Dagon. The substitution shifts the work from erotic encounter toward an exploration of fear, fascination, and psychological dependence. Set within a vividly green, untamed landscape, the scene evokes something primal and instinctive—the attraction to what frightens us and the adrenaline found in familiar patterns of fear. The rainbow becomes a metaphorical path toward its own “pot of gold”: self-reflection, observation, and the recognition of the fears that quietly shape our behaviour.

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His practice also extends into illustration and publishing. He has illustrated Saba Tahir's An Ember in the Ashes series and has been featured in international art publications, including Art Up Mi in Milan and Flora Fiction in the United States. His work was also included in the 2026 art catalogue Sphaera Activitatis, published by Osservatoriomaree in Italy.

Through this synthesis of historical reference, popular imagery, graphic language, and painterly expressionism, Stoikov constructs an artistic world in which past and present continually overlap. His paintings become spaces of “Rainbow Limbo”—strange psychological territories where memory, fantasy, cultural imagery, and contemporary experience coexist without settling into a single reality.

Stefan Stoikov

ARTWORK TITLE: "Where the Rainbow Ends"
Year: 2026

Medium: Oil on canvas, 150 × 100 cm

Stefan Stoikov (b. 1997, Izmail, Odesa region, Ukraine) is a Ukrainian artist whose practice inhabits the unstable territory between historical memory and contemporary visual culture. Drawing upon motifs and figures from different epochs, Stoikov reconfigures classical imagery through anachronistic spaces, contemporary references, and a distinctly expressionistic visual language. His paintings operate as encounters between the familiar and the displaced, where figures appear suspended outside conventional notions of time and place.

Central to Stoikov's practice is the idea of reminiscence—not as a reconstruction of the past, but as its transformation through contemporary consciousness. Classical subjects are placed alongside visual references drawn from mass culture, including cinema, comics, and computer games. These seemingly disparate sources are brought together within layered compositions that resist a single historical or cultural reading, producing what the artist describes as a multilayered, metamodern image.

His works frequently combine painting and graphic elements, creating a deliberate tension between expressive figuration and more linear, illustrative passages. Dark palettes and nocturnal settings lend the paintings a cinematic atmosphere, while elements of surrealism destabilise the apparent reality of the depicted scenes. His characters often seem caught between worlds—neither entirely belonging to the historical past nor to the contemporary present.

At the centre of this practice is the individual confronting both the self and the surrounding world. Stoikov's figures are frequently isolated, contemplative, or psychologically suspended, becoming vessels through which questions of identity, memory, alienation, and human existence are explored.

Stoikov graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kyiv in 2023, having previously studied there at undergraduate and master's levels. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions across Ukraine and internationally, including exhibitions in Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, Berlin, Riga, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. His recent exhibitions include Midday Shadow at Uniquewall Gallery & Mlyn Design Hub in Kyiv and Rainbow Limbo at Serpen Gallery in Berlin, both in 2026.

ABOUT THE WORK

Crucifixion

Tempera on canvas, 2021

In Crucifixion, the traditional Christian image is stripped of its narrative elaboration and reduced to an austere, almost spectral presence. The figure of Christ emerges from a dense field of muted greys, its vertical axis becoming the structural and psychological centre of the composition. Rather than depicting the event through explicit drama, the work approaches the Crucifixion as an image of suspension—between suffering and transcendence, body and spirit, presence and disappearance.

The restrained palette and heavily worked surface lend the painting the character of an archaeological fragment, as though the image has survived through layers of time, erosion, and memory. Flecks of colour and traces within the ground interrupt the otherwise subdued surface, suggesting wounds, remnants, or fragments of an image that can never be entirely recovered. The almost dissolving contours of the body intensify this sense of impermanence.

Here, the Crucifixion becomes less an illustration of a biblical episode than a meditation on the enduring symbolic power of sacrifice. The elongated figure appears simultaneously corporeal and immaterial, while the surrounding emptiness transforms the cross into an axis between earthly suffering and the possibility of transcendence. Pijanmanov's treatment recalls the historical persistence of sacred imagery while placing it within a contemporary language of fragmentation, absence, and existential contemplation.

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Pijanmanov has simultaneously maintained an active role in the broader construction and preservation of Macedonian cultural memory. As an editor, curator, writer, and organiser, he has initiated and contributed to exhibitions and monographic projects devoted to Macedonian artists and regional art history. His curatorial work, including projects examining the artistic heritage of Strumica, positions his practice within a wider cultural continuum, connecting individual artistic production with the histories, institutions, and communities that sustain it.

His work therefore resists a singular definition. Pijanmanov is at once painter and storyteller, image-maker and researcher, scenographer and sculptor. Across these forms, however, a consistent sensibility emerges: an attraction toward the liminal states of human existence and toward the capacity of images to preserve what is otherwise destined to disappear.

In this sense, his oeuvre can be understood as an extended meditation on remembrance. Figures, landscapes, symbols, texts, and fragments of cultural history recur not as fixed monuments to the past, but as traces continually undergoing transformation. Pijanmanov's art occupies this space between disappearance and persistence—between the inherited image and its contemporary reawakening.

Nikola Pijanmanov

ARTWORK TITLE: "Crucifixion"
Year: 2021

Medium: Tempera on canvas, 6000 × 6000 px

Born in Strumica in 1981, Nikola Pijanmanov occupies a distinctive position within contemporary Macedonian art, developing a practice in which painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, theatre, literature, and the sacred converge. Educated at the Lazar Lichenoski School of Art in Skopje and subsequently at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University, where he graduated in the class of Professor Rubens Korubin in 2005, Pijanmanov has, over the course of two decades, constructed an oeuvre defined by a persistent preoccupation with the human condition.

At the centre of his work lies the figure—not merely as an anatomical or representational subject, but as a vessel of memory, suffering, desire, mortality, and transcendence. His images frequently inhabit a threshold between the visible and the symbolic. Bodies emerge, dissolve, fragment, and endure; landscapes become psychological territories; and familiar religious and literary archetypes are transformed into meditations on existence. There is an unmistakable sense of the archaic within his visual language, yet it is never simply nostalgic. Rather, Pijanmanov approaches inherited imagery as a living vocabulary through which contemporary anxieties can be articulated.

This tension between inheritance and transformation is fundamental to his practice. His paintings and graphic works carry traces of Byzantine and Christian visual culture, the Macedonian artistic tradition, literary mythology, and the expressive possibilities of modern figuration. These references are not employed as historical quotation but as structures of memory—fragments through which questions of faith, death, identity, and the persistence of the human image are continually reconsidered.

Pijanmanov's artistic trajectory has unfolded through an extensive series of solo and group exhibitions in Macedonia and abroad. His projects have been presented in major cultural spaces in Skopje, Strumica, Veles, Prilep, Bitola, Ohrid, Belgrade, Paris, and New York. Particularly significant are his 2022 residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris and his 2024 residency in New York, experiences that expanded an already international artistic practice while retaining a strong connection to the cultural and historical landscape from which his work originates.

His engagement with theatre constitutes another important dimension of his oeuvre. Working as a scenographer and visual artist, Pijanmanov has developed environments and visual concepts for productions drawing upon works by Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Byron, Strindberg, and other major literary figures. In these projects, painting ceases to function solely as an autonomous object and becomes part of a larger dramaturgical space—an image capable of shaping atmosphere, memory, and psychological tension.

The same expansive understanding of the image extends into book illustration, illuminated manuscripts, poster design, fresco painting, and monumental public sculpture. His interventions in public space—including murals and large-scale metal sculptures—demonstrate an interest in the relationship between the artwork and collective memory. Here, the private language of the studio is transferred into communal space, where the image becomes part of the cultural landscape itself.

An especially notable chapter of Pijanmanov's interdisciplinary practice is his collaboration with the Macedonian bands Mizar, Anastasia and Traga, for whom he has produced multiple album covers. Mizar occupies an exceptional place in the cultural history of Macedonian music, and their work has come to represent an important expression of the country's alternative and experimental musical heritage. Pijanmanov's album imagery for the band extends his longstanding engagement with symbolism, ritual, darkness, and transcendence into the realm of music, creating a visual counterpart to Mizar's distinctive sonic world. The collaboration demonstrates the permeability of his practice: the same concerns that animate his paintings—myth, spirituality, mortality, memory, and transformation—are capable of moving seamlessly between canvas, stage, printed page, and album sleeve.

ABOUT THE WORK

The God We Carry, 2026
Digital illustration, 6000 × 6000 px, 300 dpi

In The God We Carry, PALACE OF THE STRANGE transforms the human spine into a symbolic procession of gods, with each vertebral section taking the form of a distinct divine face. Drawing from religious iconography, ritual masks, and Southeast Asian folklore, the work presents the spine as both a physical structure and a metaphorical vessel for belief. The repetition of eyes, faces, and ornamental forms creates a sense of accumulated spiritual presence, suggesting that the gods, myths, and beliefs we inherit become part of our own structure. Through its vivid colour and symmetrical composition, the work explores the relationship between the body, faith, identity, and the unseen forces we carry within us.

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Through this fusion of Southeast Asian cultural references, contemporary popular imagery, and symbolic storytelling, PALACE OF THE STRANGE continues to construct a visual world where ancient beliefs are not preserved as relics of the past, but transformed into strange and contemporary forms.

PALACE OF THE STRANGE (POTS)

ARTWORK TITLE: "The God We Carry"
Year: 2026

Medium: Digital Illustration\Graphic Print, 6000 × 6000 px

PALACE OF THE STRANGE (POTS) is an independent Malaysian artist and illustrator based in Shanghai, China, whose practice is deeply rooted in folklore, mythology, religious imagery, and the darker narratives embedded within traditional cautionary tales.

Growing up within the culturally diverse environment of Southeast Asia and later living across different parts of Asia, POTS developed a visual language shaped by the region’s complex relationship between popular culture, spirituality, ritual, and folklore. These influences appear throughout the artist’s work, where traditional symbols and mythological references are reinterpreted through a contemporary and often unsettling visual vocabulary. Rather than treating folklore as something belonging solely to the past, POTS approaches it as a living cultural language—one capable of reflecting contemporary fears, desires, contradictions, and social anxieties.

Central to the practice is an interest in the moral structures found within traditional stories: the relationship between good and evil, desire and consequence, punishment and rebirth, and the belief that actions inevitably carry consequences. Animals, human figures, spirits, religious symbols, masks, and other archetypal forms are frequently brought together in unexpected combinations, creating images that appear simultaneously familiar and otherworldly.

The name “Palace of the Strange” refers to an imagined space where inherited beliefs and contemporary realities coexist. Within this space, ancient visual languages are fragmented, rearranged, and transformed into new symbolic narratives. The resulting works often operate like modern myths—visually seductive yet carrying an underlying sense of warning. Beauty and unease exist together, inviting the viewer to look beyond the surface of the image and consider what may be hidden beneath it.

POTS’s practice extends beyond standalone illustration, encompassing visual work for independent musicians and bands, VJ and live-performance projects, exhibitions, and works held in private collections. Across these different contexts, the artist maintains a distinctive approach in which folklore becomes a means of examining the human condition and the consequences of what we create, desire, consume, and destroy.

ABOUT THE WORK

In "Leten Den", Mirko Vujisić presents a contemplative portrait immersed in a luminous summer landscape. The figure’s introspective gaze contrasts with the radiant sky and richly textured surroundings, creating a quiet tension between inner reflection and the vitality of nature. Vujisić’s expressive handling of paint, particularly in the textured surface and warm, earthy tones, gives the portrait a tactile quality while evoking the atmosphere of a fleeting summer moment.

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He has held 23 solo exhibitions in North Macedonia and abroad, presenting prints, drawings, and paintings. He has participated in more than 80 group exhibitions of printmaking and drawing nationally and internationally, including exhibitions in Moscow; Kanagawa, Japan; Tempe, Arizona; Richmond, Virginia; Greensboro, Maryland; Australia; Belgrade; Podgorica; Sofia; Varna; Sarajevo; Cetinje; Split; Novi Sad; Malmö; New York; and Banská Bystrica, where he received a prestigious printmaking award.

Throughout his career, he has received numerous national and international recognitions and awards for his achievements in teaching, artistic creation, and exhibition activity.

Email: mirkovujisic@yahoo.com
Tel: +389 78 454 116

Mirko Vujisić

ARTWORK TITLE: "Leten Den (Summer Day)"
Year: 1992

Medium: Oil on canvas, 90 × 80 cm

Prof. M.A. Mirko Vujisić was born in 1957 in Macedonia (Yugoslavia).

He completed five years of study at the School of Applied Arts in Skopje, specializing in Graphic Arts, in 1977. In 1979, he graduated from the Pedagogical Academy. In 1984, he graduated as a member of the first generation of students at the Faculty of Fine Arts (FLU) in Skopje, Department of Graphic Arts, in the class of Prof. Dragutin Avramovski-Gute. In 1998, he obtained his Master's degree at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade under Prof. Nebojša Radojev.

In 1984, he received the FLU Award for the Best Academic Achievement in his major professional and artistic subject, Graphic Arts. In 1985, he received the Award for Best Student of the Generation at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. In 1989, he was awarded a Charter for Outstanding Academic Achievement between the two jubilees of 1949–1989, marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of the University.

His artistic practice encompasses printmaking, drawing, painting, and calligraphy. He is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Skopje, where he teaches drawing, printmaking, and various printmaking techniques.

Alongside his teaching activities, Prof. Vujisić is actively involved in writing reviews and forewords, promoting exhibitions, and supporting and developing young artists through educational visual arts workshops both in North Macedonia and abroad.

Between 2004 and 2012, he visited the Centre for Visual Research – Academy in Belgrade seven times with groups of his students, each stay lasting two weeks, focusing on printmaking techniques such as algography and lithography. During this period, as part of the exhibition concept “Professor and His Students,” he organized two exhibitions—one at the Student City in Belgrade and another at the exhibition gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad.

ABOUT THE WORK

Pyramid, 2025

Graphic Pen · 3000 × 3000 px

In Pyramid, Bela Macka constructs a satirical vision of social hierarchy through the interweaving of the food chain, biological structures, and political symbolism. A tiered pyramid places the artist-like figure at its apex, followed by investors, bankers, and governments, then innovators and local councils, with workers and producers forming its broad foundation. Each level is marked by symbols of power, ideology, and material organisation, exposing the contradictions embedded within systems of authority. Those who produce the greatest wealth and resources occupy the lowest position, while those above them consume the results of their labour. Through meticulous linework and intricate, almost diagrammatic figures, Macka challenges conventional ideas of production and consumption, revealing a system in which the apparent consumers may themselves be the most thoroughly consumed.

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Her work has been exhibited in North Macedonia and internationally, including participation in Osten's World Gallery of Cartoons, where she received recognition as an Outstanding Cartoonist, as well as receiving the Best Debut Comic award at the International Comic Book Salon in Veles.

The White Cat (Бела Мачка)

ARTWORK TITLE: "Pyramid"
Year: 2025

Medium: Graphic Pen · 3000 × 3000 px

Aleksandra Najdovska(Bela Macka) is a Macedonian-Australian multidisciplinary artist whose practice is situated at the intersection of political cartooning, conceptual art, graphic printmaking, and the conservation and restoration of cultural heritage.

Born in Sydney, Australia, with family roots in Demir Hisar, North Macedonia, her artistic development has been shaped by the meeting of Balkan cultural history and international visual culture, Politics and Religion.

Najdovska studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje, where she completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Arts, specialising in Conservation and Restoration. Her training in traditional printmaking and the preservation of historical artworks established a strong material foundation for a practice that would later extend into installation, digital media, illustration, video and political imagery.

An important period in her early professional development was her work with Deutsche Welle (DW) between 2017 and 2021, where she worked as a socio-political cartoonist, journalist and visual content creator through the Balkan Booster projects. Her work addressed questions of identity, political power, cultural memory and social change across the Balkans. Here, the graphic language of caricature became a form of visual journalism, allowing her to respond directly to the political and social realities of her time.

Alongside political cartooning, Najdovska developed a distinctive conceptual practice. Her 2018 solo exhibition HAOS in Demir Hisar brought together installation, graphic art, comics, digital media and graffiti to examine local political and social realities. In 2024, her solo exhibition Lorem Ipsum at Centar Jadro in Skopje expanded these concerns into broader philosophical questions surrounding modern existence, political and economic systems, spirituality, technology and the future of humanity.

Her practice is also deeply connected to the preservation of cultural heritage. She has participated in the conservation and restoration of medieval frescoes, archaeological mosaics, paintings and historical objects, including work associated with sites such as Stobi and churches in Ohrid and Veles. This dual position—as an artist concerned with creating contemporary images and a conservator concerned with preserving historical ones—forms an important characteristic of her practice.

Najdovska's work ultimately occupies a space between archive and intervention. Through printmaking she engages with the material history of the graphic arts; through conservation she preserves traces of the past; and through political cartooning and conceptual art she interrogates the present. Across these disciplines, her central concern remains the role of the image as a vehicle for memory, criticism, social awareness and human reflection.