Maria Kozic Self-portrait

The Artist

From the  Museum of Contemporary Art website, Maria Kozic is an artist and performer who works across sculpture, painting, film and video, as well as large-scale installation. She first came to prominence in the late 1970s as a member of the avant-garde performance group Tsk-Tsk-Tsk, formed by Phillip Brophy in Melbourne in 1977. In the early 1990s Kozic and Brophy released a number of experimental musical collaborations under the name Maria Kozic & the MK-Sound, which sonically remade her ‘sex and violence’ paintings from her exhibition Help! held at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Sydney in 1989. Kozic’s feminist oriented artwork draws on range of material, particularly pop art and popular culture sources such as comic book graphics, cult films and pop music.

Kozic’s work is held in a number of public collections nationally including National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth.

The Work of Art

Kozic's self portrait  is a very bright, if a bit disturbing portrait. The colours  and patterns resemble decay and putrifaction. The face  looks as if in shock. The  image is a mask overlaying Kozic's face, which can be seen through the eye -holes.  The image was created and published using a photographic screenprint process in 1987 and was included in 'the Land'  portfolio to mark the  anniversary of the bicentenary of European arrival on the continent of Australia.  This is the 54th edition of a limited run of 80 printed.

Kozic's other works of art in other collections  similarly are talking pieces and often stop the viewer and  can  shock.  Maria's Masterpieces is a comment on pop-art and contemporary art. Here, Kozic explodes Andy Warhol's tin of Campbell's soup.

Reference:

https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/artists/maria-kozic/