Tanja Softić

Tanja Softić (b. 1966) is a Bosnian-American artist whose distinctive work across printmaking, drawing, photography, and book arts explores themes of cultural belonging, hybridity, and memory. Born in Bosnia, Softić studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo before completing her MFA in Printmaking at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia in 1992. Her cross-cultural artistic education and personal experience of displacement have deeply shaped her mature practice.

Softić has described her approach to her work in her own words:

"I use languages of printmaking, drawing, photography and poetic text to explore questions of cultural belonging, hybridity and memory. I work on and with the paper, the substrate civilizations are recorded upon, the last bastion of tactility in our world of virtual images. The processes themselves and metaphors they offer, the physicality of paper and drawing media, the visual sources I use, all inform my work."

She continues:

"There is no discernible center of my images, and the floating elements come in and out of focus, alternatively anchoring and orbiting others, settling nowhere permanently. I use perspective, but not as illusionistic tool. I cultivate the space in drawing or print that is polyphonic and at times contradictory. The works are metaphorical maps of change, perishing and memory. They beg for highly individualized, poetic translation. I hope that the viewer sees them the way one sees a familiar thicket of weeds one day, in particular moment, in particular light, suddenly awash in form and meaning."

Softić teaches at the University of Richmond, where she has mentored generations of younger artists while continuing to develop her own personal practice. She is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant, the National Endowment for the Arts and Southern Arts Federation Visual Artist Fellowship, and the Soros Foundation Open Society Institute Grant. Her work is included in collections worldwide, among them the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress Print Department, and the New South Wales Gallery of Art in Sydney, Australia.