
Ana Kala (Kalacanović, 1977, Belgrade) grew up in an agricultural village by the Danube river and started her studies of fine art at Montgomery College in Houston, where she was the first student to have a solo exhibition. Her raw talent caught the attention of the art community and she was invited to attend SUNY at Purchase as an international merit scholar in 1999.
In 2001 she returned to Serbia to withdraw into herself and began to explore the genesis of creativity in the subconscious, developing her abstract expressionist style on canvas. Since her return to Europe, Kala’s work has been shown in exhibits in Belgrade, London, Berlin, The Hague and Amsterdam. She currently lives and works between Amsterdam and Belgrade and is a member of the Association of Applied Arts Artists and Designers of Serbia.

I spend months in preparation involving thinking about new series of paintings. These months are more important than actual materialization of the painting. I think about all intensity, the emotions that happen, all the spirals within, everything that might or should show up on the canvas thru the layers of colors and energetic jerks when splashing the paint, the sound of that splash, wrist move. In that process something happens that is similar to transcendence, when all intellectual side stops, when blockage is broken, and there is just a state of mind, blissfulness, mindfulness, however you wish to call it. Then it happens, then the purity of the self can be delivered on that canvas.
The moment of Creation is the moment to live for, the moment when you think – this is the Infinity. It is the moment when the gate of the World outside of our own opens up, it is the mirror, the light of acknowledgment, it cannot be measured.