Palazzo delle Esposizioni museum "GAPscape - State of Art - Italia" Rome, May 2016
	Art is an enquiry on the world, and the artist is its special envoy in reality. Art massages the atrophied muscle of collective sensitivity. Art is a catastrophic disruption in the equilibrium of interpersonal communication. Paradoxically it is the ability of relating and playing between catastrophe and communication, and Minya handles both these aspects with balance. ...more

Through rupture and linguistic catastrophe she creates personal images starting from her observation of the world and its realities. And at the other end, through form, she communicates the favourable outcome of this catastrophic act. This time, the catastrophic act was the search for excellences within the social reality surrounding the artist and her audience; excellences on the moral and social planes, in terms of economic and political achievement, figures who through their behaviour have been capable of adding value to their country’s identity; in this case, Italy. Rhetoric of old tells us that Italy is a country of poets, warriors and sailors. The range of characters chosen by the artist is well documented by their personal stories and, I should add, by their aptitude to be transfigured into icons. This catastrophic intervention on language is successful because the artist uses an absolutely personal technique. She effectively brings to surface with pixels and manual ability the figures, the representation, the transposition of recognizable characters from life to the work of art. Their familiarity is such thanks to their passage through a linguistic grill. A formal, original system that shows us how art which comes forth from moral impetuosity is in itself a question, holding an adequate and accurate linguistic answer. This figuration produces a gallery, a sample of existing, behavioural, professional excellences who provide a behavioural model through the contemplation the public has towards them, thus contributing, while motionless, through this new iconography, to develop and massage the atrophied muscle of collective sensitivity. This collectively organized social endeavour hence produces new processes of knowledge creation. In our case, the awareness of new ways of producing images, of painting, while on the other hand, the capability of creating, illustrating the history of our country.

	Palazzo delle Esposizioni museum "GAPscape - State of Art - Italia" Rome, May 2016
	“GAPscape – STATE OF ART – ITALIA” expresses the flair of the original and contemporary artist Minya, providing a dynamic, positive idea of Italy as a forge for talents, a land of ingenuity and passionate professionals. For this reason, Lazio Region has chosen to support this cultural project, which counts on the precious contribution of Achille Bonito Oliva, its promoter. ...more

Additionally, Minya chose to portray me - along over thirty others – in his project, adding an element of personal emotion for me. In this double role of protagonist and viewer, I observe and appreciate this work of great artistic value and impact. Minya has selected faces of men and women from different professional segments: from art to sports, from show business to politics, from civil engagement to humanitarian effort. The author defines these men and women as “ambassadors of made Italy”, valued national and international assets. Figures from many different Italian cities, all joined together in the representation of the “body” and “soul” of our Country. Minya has succeeded in immortalizing a heritage of places and people who have now become a common heritage. This is clearly an innovative, modern, vibrant project, a project that stands out from many others.

Palazzo delle Esposizioni museum "GAPscape - State of Art - Italia" Rome, May 2016

An artistic project that leaves a mark. That celebrates the excellence of the Made in Italy by emphasizing – through special portraits – the outstanding value of our country thanks to the uniqueness of the people who characterize it. Achille Bonito Oliva has put together many small works of art and with the support of Minya has produced a project that could become the most effective visiting card for promoting a winning image of the Italian tradition, and to support us in the challenges we have to face including the Olympic challenge of Rome 2024. ...more

Many protagonists, but one common denominator: the sense of belonging to our roots, the legitimate pride of representing and upholding a tradition mirrored in success. I am particularly proud that this project has a strong athletic matrix, and I’m not speaking of myself but of the athletes, the champions who are bearers of the very best image of our nation, who write history through their example of talent and determination, because every finish line is reached with self-sacrifice and determination. The project is a lesson reflected in our everyday life, that makes sport into a life style, a concept that this prestigious gallery has been able to enhance with masterly artist flair. It is the projection of a culture that distinguishes us, of a universal language that embraces many different fields. It is a project that communicates through the sinuosity and elegance of outlines, through the expression of tonalities, through the richness of details. It is an inestimable heritage that we must safeguard in order to nurture the history of Italy.

Palazzo delle Esposizioni museum "GAPscape - State of Art - Italia" Rome, May 2016

Palazzo delle Esposizioni is delighted to host “GAPScape – STATE of ART – Italia”, a project promoted and curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, that ideally opens the path to Rome’s candidacy as host to the 2024 Olympic Games. For this reason, the exhibition displaying the works of art by Minya, portraits of many of the outstanding Italians of today, comes to us with the support of the Committee for Rome 2024. ...more

A joint effort on behalf of all the Country’s forces to back this great endeavor, an enterprise in which culture, in its multiple settings and manifestations, may express a leading role in national affairs. This event is such an occasion, a project that gathers together the great thought provoker and advocate for culture that is Bonito Oliva, Minya, the original artist very perceptive of issues concerning communication, the generous, open disposition of the many personages who lent themselves to be pictured, and an important venue such as the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. We are certain the spirit of intellectual and institutional cooperation materialized in the realization of the project “GAPscape – STATE of ART – Italia” should and shall follow the entire path of Rome’s candidacy for the 2024 Olympic Games.

solo exhibition in Ellebi gallery "Visual communication that tells the story of humanity" Cosenza, April 2012

A discourse that is never one-sided, the one woven through Minya's works, through words that are not really words, but which translate — as in an archaic past — into lines and symbols. No rhetoric, no evocation of languages that once were, yet it is necessary to allude to them, since it is from there that the artist sets out to illustrate her journey. A journey spanning ten years that recounts the mechanisms of communication, so ever-changing: from cave art, with its graffiti, to the present day, an era in which technology moves at extreme speeds. A reflection on language and around language. ...more

Perhaps a new street artist? But not in the sense we all know — hers is a nomadic action that leaves no permanent mark on the surface upon which it "rests". It creates a give and take, from the geographical-spatial context to that of the painted surface, when this is a plexiglass sheet — as an extension and evolution of the canvas — a material that, being entirely non-invasive, allows the artist a singular intervention upon the landscape. Perhaps a performance whose outcome could be a post-production documentation. An itinerary, an engraved map, just as her works appear engraved — trails of stories narrating human events across fragmented, rough surfaces. Minya simulates the pixels of digital images, creating a line of connection between the present and the past, producing captivating planes that are both tactile and visual. A continuous research, both technical and of thought, a steady journey without flights of fancy, yet one that allows her to achieve ever-new results in works that evolve over the years.
In Minya's works, the lines and movements — sometimes sinuous, at times scratching and nervous — constitute the human, primordial element upon contemporary materials. And so the free gesture stands alongside rule and method, so necessary to express the idea. Perhaps Minya constructs a body: there is the soul, and there is the flesh. A marked, engraved flesh, that transforms its nature to become something other than itself. Layers of matter like layers of distant epochs rising to the surface through cuts, tunnels, or reliefs. Almost a parallel world, the negative image of what lies on this side. It is never an absolute letting go, it is not chaos. Segmented figures, recomposed, around which our movement, perhaps, is nothing other than a ritual dance, ready, once again, to lead us back through time. But a plexiglass surface is not only transparency — it is determination and will, for here, there is no going back.
Standing before the wall, one grasps the essence — the pictorial element that acquires, through it, a particular three-dimensionality, particular because it is intangible, shifting with the shifting of light. A plexiglass "painting" never ends, but changes, evolves in its inevitable encounter with what lies beyond and around it.
GAPscape is precisely this — observing, peering through cracks and fissures — and Minya's Urban Art is one that acts upon the landscape, perhaps drawing its very origin from it. Places like New York, Rome, London, alter their appearance, their nature, and at the same time the "painting" becomes a classical element or loudly proclaims its contemporaneity. It is no longer a matter of absorbing the "text" within the confines of the canvas, granting it "eternal life", but rather an experience of the here and now — and never a one-way experience.
Her artistic journey does not stop here, and so other subjects, new formal experimentations take shape in her work — portraits. Here, more than anywhere else, the lights, the shadows, the lines of faces, the gazes, are the result of a perspectival interplay between the inside and the outside. She adds when something is missing, and steps back to watch when it is the light that intervenes.
Works that are mutable, then — modifying and being modified in relation to their context. Minya intervenes to organise space, and does so with simple "rules", without any imposition, merely providing a tool for an observation that is as subjective as possible. There is no before and after — there is simply a shifting and simultaneous vision, around which "ancestral" movements recall its origin.

Edieuropa gallery "Primordial Languages in Minya's Modern Conception" Rome, April 2011

In the ancestral memory of mankind, symbols lie at the foundation of traditions handed down through time. First among these were those who left upon rock the indelible marks that speak of times infinitely distant, yet which find space in our thoughts, erasing oblivion from the mists of history. Figures drawn, sculpted, born from the fascinated gaze of the first men who looked upon the majestic creation of nature not as mere spectators, but as actors capable of deciding the fate of humanity through their actions and their transcribed languages — conscious of leaving to posterity the alchemical recipe of immortality, which only art can bestow upon mankind. ...more

The symbols with which the exceptionally talented artist Minya speaks to the art world today are not merely the product of a modern language, but arrive directly from those cave paintings that remain imprinted in her mind and which now re-emerge in all their chromatic and symbolic beauty throughout her works. Her art seems to merge with the history of her Serbian origins, in the beautiful city of Novi Sad — an ancient city inhabited over 4,500 years ago by Palaeolithic settlements — and those men and those symbols have found in Minya the worthy custodian of their ancestral messages. Minya is not simply an artist who paints her canvases to please the eyes of the public; she seeks to speak through colours and her sinuous figures to all those who pause to admire her works. Within them lies hidden the mystery of the birth of life, in the swirling passages that await the human being so that their existence may come to light. Through her abstract art, the artist intends to convey, metaphorically, the hidden logos of the history of the image — for each work has its own language and its own independent story, and admits no repetition. Her paintings are born upon elements destined to become servants of the light, which projects them into an unreal dimension concealed only by the dreamless lack of the modern man. Those who dare to dream and look beyond Minya's works discover the beauty of time's passage in each of its moments. Even a single minute can prove fundamental to understanding them, for as they are traversed by the ever-changing reflection of light — which inexorably grants time the honour of arms — every minute spent intensely admiring those endless roads of colour makes us aware that her paintings have no fixed place in time. They are time itself, passing and projecting onto them the dimension of being — but only if one so wishes — or of non-being, if one allows oneself to be consumed by modern thought, which rests its gaze only at the first flutter of an eyelash. The pure pigments with which Minya works are that indissoluble bond between the ancient and the modern, between primordial languages and today's expressions born from a new conception of graphic design technology. She intends her works to be a testament to posterity of her very self — simple and delicate in the gentle flow of pastel colours, yet strong and proud in the fire-red scratches fuelled by a passion for art, which is the foundation for those who wish to leave behind works that are not anonymous, but enduring through time. With her way of interpreting informal art, Minya becomes metaphorically the fulcrum of an hourglass, through which the sands of a pictorial and interpretative past flow through the first chamber, only to be recast in a modern and emblematic key in the second. Her very being is perpetually divided between what has been and what will be — between her present life in Rome, the city that emblematises the ancient world, and ultra-modern New York, the metropolis as expression of the future; between the canvas, the support upon which she exalts the colours of the real and visible world, and plexiglass, upon which light-hungry figures are projected into their deepest dimension. "I love to experiment and play, exploring ever-different techniques... I very much enjoy working with pigments... creating strong contrasts using opposing materials such as plexiglass and natural pigments." With this outlook, Minya aims to astonish the world of modern art, ever in search of new expressive and communicative languages capable of surprising the viewer. Each work stands alone, each has its own precise place, each deceives and persuades the gaze, each conveys different sensations, each is born with a specific title that situates it within the deepest reflection of human understanding. GAPscape — this is the term by which to define her art, and with which Minya herself defines it: that going beyond every conception, the irrepressible search for the urban legend of being and non-being, of that ancestral doorway that allows one to pass beyond the beyond of every dimension — that infinite temporal fissure, the dream of the human soul. Minya, daughter of artists, completed her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Novi Sad and taught Graphic Design. Before graduating in 1999, she moved to Rome, where she lives and works. Over the years she has held numerous exhibitions throughout Italy, including a wonderful open-air show in the shadow of the Colosseum, before arriving in 2006 on the exhibition scene of New York, in the heart of the celebrated Manhattan. Pablo Picasso once said: "Painting is a blind man's profession: one does not paint what one sees, but what one feels, what one tells oneself about what one has seen." Enclosed within this aphorism lies Minya's art.