Zemun in paint: the art of Jelena Bibić

The Belgrade painter Jelena Bibić, daughter of the Zemun architect Boba Bibić, paints the lanes, old houses, Gardoš Tower and Danube views of the town she grew up in: a look at her Zemun Street Life paintings.

Some artists visit a town to paint it. Jelena Bibić grew up in hers. The Belgrade painter, a graduate of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade and a member of the artists’ associations ULUS and ULUPUDS, is best known abroad for her eagles, her horses and her portraits of Nikola Tesla. Closer to home she has spent years on a quieter, more personal body of work: the Zemun Street Life paintings, a portrait of the old Habsburg town on the Danube where her family has its roots.

Drawn like an architect: the aquarelles

Her aquarelles are where her father’s architecture shows most clearly. Slobodan “Boba” Bibić, the Zemun architect and photographer, trained at the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade and spent his life looking at Zemun’s façades and alleys as buildings to be understood, recorded and preserved; Jelena grew up seeing the town through those eyes. In these pen-and-ink drawings, washed with sepia watercolour, she draws Zemun almost as an architect would: precise lines, exact perspective, every roof pitch, cornice and window in its place. Fine, delicate lines and a draughtsman’s daring with perspective make them some of the most exciting works she has made.

The structure comes from her father’s way of seeing; the colour, movement and light are entirely her own.

The subjects are the town’s own structures: a lane of low houses under a web of overhead wires, a cottage roof with Gardoš Tower rising behind it, an old well wheel below a Baroque church tower, and grand façades along a busy street. Then comes the wash, light and delicate, and the drawing turns from a record into a painting: the structure is her father’s way of seeing, the atmosphere entirely her own.

The same architect’s eye shapes her oils. In one painting she sets Dragiša Brašovan’s modernist Air Force Command building, with Zlata Markov’s Icarus flying from its side, against the old houses climbing to Gardoš Tower: modern and Habsburg Zemun in a single street, drawn with an architect’s command of line and painted in sunlit colour.

An architect’s daughter

Jelena is the daughter of Slobodan “Boba” Bibić, the Zemun architect, photographer and videographer, and you can see his training in her canvases. The structure comes from her father’s way of seeing; the colour, movement and light are entirely her own.

The streets she paints

Her Zemun is a town of close, cobbled lanes. In one painting a little red car waits in a narrow street that glows amber and violet, with Gardoš Tower rising at its far end. In another, a crowd strolls down a sunlit shopping street under awnings and balconies.

She is drawn, too, to the town’s old houses: a half-timbered inn with a wooden boat turned into a planter and a bicycle propped against the wall, a church spire beyond; and a cobbled street climbing towards a white church tower, painted on rough linen so that the weave shows through the light.

Gardoš Tower and the river

Gardoš Tower, the millennium tower of 1896 that crowns Zemun’s hill, is a recurring presence. She has painted it as an architectural study on raw linen, its brick and stone washed with turquoise and ochre, and, in one of her most striking works, with one of her signature eagles landing on its parapet, wings spread against an icy blue sky.

She returns to the hill in print, too. Gardoš, a black-and-white print of 2015, cuts the tower and a neighbouring church tower into bold silhouettes against a pale sky. A spare ink drawing of a church tower and an old well wheel shows her lighter, graphic hand.

Her Gardoš can be playful, too: in one sunset painting, hot-air balloons drift past the tower while a sailing boat and a kayak cross the Danube below.

From the hill she also paints the view the other way: Gardoš Tower standing over a slope of orange roofs and green gardens, with the wide Danube beyond.

The town is just as compelling from the water. Her view of Zemun from the Danube shows the red roofs and church towers of the old town above the quay, with boats on the river and gulls wheeling over the water: the view every visitor sees on arrival by boat.

Close to home

Her portraiture has taken her work far beyond Serbia: she is Serbia’s Tesla Ambassador, received a Tesla Science Foundation award at the New Yorker Hotel in New York, and her work hangs permanently in New York. Her paintings of Zemun, though, have stayed close to home, kept and shown almost entirely within Serbia.

She sits on the board of Galerija Ikar in Zemun, so the town’s own gallery is a good place to start looking for her work; exhibitions change, so check her website for current shows and commissions. Then walk the lanes she paints, from the quay up to Gardoš Tower, and you will recognise them at every turn.