Jadranka Kosorcic is in search of, in search of potential models of identification. She is looking for them by means of advertisement, e-mails, asking people directly or distributing flyers with the following lines: “Artist is looking for people m/f willing to pose for a portrait. Time spent: 1-3h. Send photo to kosorcic@hotmail.com.”Once she found a person, with whom she is able to make a special connection of identification, they meet in her studio, they talk, communicate, and Jadranka Kosorcic takes a portrait. The result of this artistic process ranges somewhere between Comic, wanted photo and Andy Warhol.

The aesthetic strategy not only reveals the created surface of the drawn portraits, but documents the realization of identification with various persons of different sexes. Today the act of identification is the very essence of identity. In view of that Wolfgang Welsh wrote in terms of cultural criticism: “Identity doesn’t result quasi-biologically from the development of an indivisible core of personality, but from the act of identification.” He postulates on the contrary the possibility of “multiple identities” according to a person’s identification with several “types and roles”. Thus Jadranka Kosorcic presents in her work the process of identification beyond the identical, beyond the eternal “one” of the old subject.

While in his essay “Identity in Transition” (1990) Wolfgang Welsch still believes in an “unrestricted absorption” of the models, i.e. in an indissoluble multiple identity; Jadranka Kosorcic shows in her portraits that the necessary effort of identification and the corresponding aesthetic structure represent only a sort of “identikit pictures” (JK). These phantoms signify an approach to something – which the artist calls a “between”, folding the “Being” of the artist to meet the “Being” of the painted model. This attempt of portraits becoming self-portraits is instable and contains a collapse. The problem is naturally complex, but two focal points may be singled out: the “Being” of the artist changes constantly, whereas the image, the medium of record is a rigid system despite of its sketchy appearance – once fixed it is established. The work of Jadranka Kosorcic is fugitive, because she is aware of the distance to the image . Roland Barthes expresses the very same thing regarding a photographic self-portrait: “Myself never coincidences with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn; and myself which is light, divided, dispersed.”

Raimar Stange

1Wolfgang Welsch refers to Cindy Shermann’s the “Stills”. Jadranka Kosorcic relates a role-play of her earlier works to the very same artist.

2Jadranka Kosorcic is aware of the fugitive nature of the act of identification. That’s why her work differs from the early portraits of Elizabeth Peyton. The US-American artist may have treated the matter of identification with a portrayed model, but has hardly questioned the structure.

The exclusive interest in my work is focused on the portrait. In recent years limited to drawing as pictoral means of expression, meanwhile extended to painting. Although influenced by expressive painting my central concern lies not in the discussion on the medium of painting per se, but in its use best suited to me as means of directly and immediately reproducing the tension between the artist as subject and the object (the portrayed person).

The choice of sitters stands at the beginning of my work and is decisive for the outcome ("success") of a portrait.

Only seldom is it possible to generate a tension between me and the opposite.

Through the placement of ads in various newspapers, spontaneously speaking to people in the street, on the Underground, etc. a range of choice opens up, allowing me to find an individual I can identify with. Sex, nationality, age or class make no difference.

To create a visual experience of the "in between" of two subjects is to be seen as the essential starting point of my artistic work.

Ultimately the outcome can be understood as a "phantom image" overlaying my own "self" with that of the object to form one image.

Jadranka Kosorcic