Ivana Vozelj is a London-based figurative painter. She earned her bachelor's degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London, in 2022, followed by a year of painting study at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in Venice, Italy. She completed her Master's in Painting at the Royal College of Art in 2024 and plans to return to complete her second degree at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia.
Vozelj’s practice examines her relationship with time, memory, and the enduring specter of nostalgia, exploring how these forces influence the medium of painting. In particular, she explores the materiality of analog film, considering how its distinctive qualities — from light leaks to color distortions — might conceptually and materially cannibalize within her paintings. This approach highlights the paradox of painting as a medium that remains both historically rooted and continually transformed.
Her work is informed by art history, film, literature, and philosophy, particularly the writings of Jacques Derrida, Mark Fisher, and Fredric Jameson. Through a surrealist visual language, Vozelj evokes the tension between presence and absence. Her introspective narratives feature recurring subjects and settings, serving as extensions of her subconscious. In doing so, she blurs the boundaries between truth and myth, conjuring false memories of the past while the omnipresent gaze of the sea lingers as a constant observer.
Come True Right Now (the Rise), 2025 Oil on linen, 170 x 130 cm
Come True Right Now (the Fall), 2025 Oil on linen, 170 x 130 cm
Quis Est Iste, 2024, Oil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm
From the revivalist aesthetics of TV series like Stranger Things(2016) , with its meticulous recreation of the 1980s through period-specific details like retro fashion, synth-heavy music, vintage props, and cultural references, nostalgia emerges not simply as a sentimental longing but as a dynamic and affective force. It reflects a contemporary condition in which linear notions of time are destablised, and the past persistently reappears as a lived present. In this temporal collapse, time is no longer experienced as a progression but rather a spatialised loop; and retro fashion not merely a stylistic choice but a material expression of this temporal folding, embodying how cyclical trends become part of our fragmented, nonlinear experience of time.
Vozelj’s painting similarly interrogates the affective pull of a past she never directly lived, yet deeply internalised through cultural memory. Her obscured self—partially present, partially withdrawn—emerges within the paradox of mediated recollection, filtered through images, narratives, and cultural references. In this sense, her nostalgia is a *conscious* one: not only intimately felt personally, but also critically aware of nostalgia’s double-edged nature—its ability to both soothe and distort, heal and regress. This self-awareness lends her work a deeper resonance, allowing her private sensibilities to resonate within a shared cultural psyche, thus making the personal poignantly communal.
In constructing this complex temporal realm as a pictorial space, Vozelj’s work resonates with a wider current in contemporary painting, where the **spatialisation** of time becomes a means for engaging with memory, history, identity, and affect. Rather than unfolding temporality through linear narrative or illustrative chronology, Ivana’s work prioritises a visual language that layers, fragments, and juxtaposes time-bound codes. Within this logic, nostalgia is treated as more than an emotional response to the past; **a constructed visual condition**: a space where mediated histories and aesthetic residues circulate and collide. Her paintings do not seek to return to a prior moment, but to materialise how the past persists, filtered through affect, detached from origin, and embedded in surface.
It is within this logic—where temporality is dislodged from linear flow and reorganised across the surface—that Vozelj’s paintings begin to operate heterotopically. Vozelj’s pictorial surfaces do not mirror history, but absorb its traces—reproduced, aestheticised, and detached from origin. By staging these mediated fragments within the same compositional field, she generates a visual environment in which temporalities collide without resolving. The painting becomes a site of simultaneity, of emotional and historical residues coexisting uneasily, and thus constitutes what might be called a ***nostalgic heterotopia***: a space that makes visible the conditions under which collective memory is both constructed and destabilised. This heterotopic space does not represent nostalgia—it performs, spatialises, and renders its contradictions perceptible.