Ivana Pipal’s Invisible Spaces were created at the intersection of visual arts and psychotherapy, by translating research of the human psyche and its mechanisms into artistic speech. Relying on the experiences of neuroscience, psychotherapy, and psychology as well as various techniques for raising the awareness of presence, the artist has built a visual language as a tool for understanding the inner world, feelings, and abstract thinking.

The drawings and paintings created in the process bring visual symbols on the borderline between figurative and abstract, which will remind us that the earliest scripts were pictorial as well. From them, as well as from the exhibition layout, it is possible to read the methodology of researching invisible spaces. The exhibition opens with stones as a sculpture directly taken from the natural environment. As a substance created by the transformation of living into inanimate nature, stone marks the transition from the outside world to the world of ancient, silent, and unspoken memories, uncertainties, visions, apparitions, and forgotten dreams. Dream space thus becomes a place of mental experiment, documented and mediated by visual notes. Furthermore, in the white space of exhibition and the interior, fragments of research, as the artist calls them, are being arranged and rearranged. We recognize this in the individual work as well as in the exhibition as a whole: by entering the exhibition space, we have also entered the space of one of the exhibited paintings, as well as the space of the artist’s mind. Additional spaces open up from each individual fragment, and their possible sequence is infinite.

The visualized concepts and symbols have not been chosen at random, and are not a mere mirror of the artist’s psyche. By speaking of these visualizations as research, the artist, fully aware of the mind’s ability to simultaneously create and analyse the world, approaches her own mental space as both a laboratory and a studio. The concepts she is presenting and using to build visualizations are not just immediate spontaneous abstractions, but arise from the methodology of studying consciousness and one’s own mental processes with the aim of defining the laws, structures, and mechanisms of these inner, invisible spaces.

Curated by: Jasna Jakšić

Exhibition design: Ivana Pipal, Vanja Babić

Technical set-up: Dalibor Cicvara, Davor Filipčić, Aleksandar Milošević, Ivan Tudek, Filip Zima

Design: Sanja Kuzmanović, Ivana Pipal

Supported by: Grad Zagreb