JAKSIC-BERGER, MIMI (1936-2022)

"Morning Over Barrier Reef" (1988)
oil on canvas
101 x 173cm
signed lower left
*St Constantine & Helen Orthodox Church Collection, Newtown
 
Mimi Jaksic-Berger was a prominent Yugoslav-born Australian Abstract Expressionist & Refugee. She studied Art College at Pec (Kosovo), & taught art in Serbia. At the age of 22, Jaksic-Berger embarked on an arduous escape on foot from war-torn Socialist Yugoslavia that took her across the Balkan Peninsula to Italy, France & then Australia. Arriving in Melbourne in 1959, she relocated the following year to Sydney. She worked as a commercial artist & designer from 1960-7. In Paris, she had become acquainted with the abstract works of the tachistes, whose emotionally charged, gestural brushwork & splashes of pigment had a strong resonance for her. Adopting this style of lyrical abstraction in 1966, she exhibited work in this manner at the Young Contemporaries Exhibition at the Blaxland Gallery in 1968. Like the artist-émigrés from Europe whose avant-garde concepts were seminal to the development of the post-war abstract expressionist movement of the New York School in America, Jaksic-Berger would pioneer lyrical abstraction in her adoptive country. The recipient of 154 art awards, Jaksic-Berger is represented in public, corporate & public collections, including the AGNSW, National Gallery of Australia; QAGOMA; Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art, S.H. Ervin Gallery, Sydney; National Gallery of Modern Art Belgrade; MOMA Skopje; The Phillips Collection, Washington DC; Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY. She has been a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute since 1968.