Artist Profile

Marijana Petrović Mikulić is a Croatian painter whose practice explores the relationship between perception, memory, and the passage of time. She graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Educational Sciences before studying painting under Professor E. R. Tanay and later completing a Master of Fine Arts in Painting at the Arthouse – College of Visual Arts in Ljubljana, Slovenia, under Professors Matic Kos and Mladen Jernejc. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Petrović Mikulić found inspiration in the parks of Sisak, where she painted people and their everyday stories directly from observation. Her Between Dream and Reality cycle develops these initial impressions through a process of artistic “negation”: returning to the same motifs in her studio, she gradually removes descriptive elements to arrive at essential relationships of colour, contrast, and form. Moving between realism and abstraction, her paintings transform captured moments into a more distilled visual language, reflecting on memory, emotion, human connection, and the fragile boundary between lived experience and its recollection.