Jelena Bibić: the painter known as Jeka

Who she is

Jelena Bibić is a Belgrade painter, born in 1975, who signs her work “Jeka”. She paints mainly in oil and acrylic, and is best known for eagles and wild birds, galloping horses, portraits of music and film idols, Nikola Tesla and the old streets of Zemun.

She studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, and her work has been shown in Serbia, elsewhere in Europe, the USA, China and the UAE.

A childhood spent drawing

Her parents saw her talent before she could walk or talk. As a child she drew the most vivid moments of each day, and private lessons helped her put what she saw in her head onto paper. At five she showed a set of drawings called “Birds”, and she had her first official exhibition while still at high school.

Her father, the architect and photographer Slobodan “Boba” Bibić, was her first influence. She grew up watching him draw buildings freehand with fluid, confident lines, and he kept her supplied with good paper and pencils.

Instead of a doll’s house, her prized possessions were an anatomy book for artists and a history of art. As a teenager she also rode horses and played the violin, until painting took over.

Training in Belgrade

At 18 she won a place at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade, in the class of Professor Zoran Vuković, and later received the year’s highest grade for her anatomy drawings.

The artists she looks up to range from Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Leonardo to Gauguin, Frida Kahlo, Dalí and Picasso, and the Serbian painters Milena Pavlović Barili, Mića Popović and Vladimir Veličković.

Eagles and wild animals

Eagles are the subject she is best known for, and her eagle paintings hang in homes, shops, hotels and offices in several countries. Her wildlife portraits are simple and direct: the animal looks straight out of the canvas, so the viewer meets it eye to eye.

Many show endangered species, chosen to draw attention to their conservation.

She paints wild animals looking straight out of the canvas, so that the viewer and the subject meet eye to eye.

Horses

A rider since her teens, she paints horses at full gallop, sometimes in a few loose lines of charcoal, sometimes in sweeping strokes of colour. She still spends time with horses, among them Apache and Spirit.

Portraits and the IDOL series

In her portraits she lets people be themselves, catching their natural gestures and expressions. Her IDOL series turns to music and film legends, painted in drips and bold colour, from rock stars to Blondie on the telephone.

She often turns the brush on herself. In one self-portrait her face is painted over the columns of a newspaper and shown beside the photograph it came from.

Nikola Tesla

Tesla is her great hero, and she is Serbia’s Tesla Ambassador, helping to keep his memory alive. One of her large portraits shows him in electric blue among his coils, motors and equations, with the sign of the New Yorker Hotel, where he spent his last years, glowing in the corner.

New techniques

She keeps trying new media, from mosaics and stained glass to three-dimensional painting. She has also made wearable art: a hand-painted coat, a tribute to Brandon Lee for the 30th anniversary of The Crow, which she wore to a gallery launch in SoHo, New York.

Teaching and the Belgrade art world

She is a member of the artists’ associations ULUS and ULUPUDS and sits on the board of Galerija Ikar in Zemun. She has taught art in Serbia and fine art in Shanghai, and enjoys mentoring young artists, as her own teachers once mentored her.

Zemun in paint

Closer to home, her Zemun Street Life paintings follow everyday life in the lanes of old Zemun, with its low houses, church towers and Gardoš Tower as the backdrop.

Our advice: see her Zemun paintings first, then walk up to Gardoš Tower for the view over the roofs and the Danube that she paints.