Piercings, bikinis, tattoos, cellulite — there’s a lot of tantalizing, sexy detail to absorb in Adelisa Selimbašić’s paintings. And yet, the work’s depth exceeds its surface elements. The young artist creates figurative pieces that “represent a mood, a vibe” of inclusive, contemporary femininity. In her playful, stylized canvases, she celebrates a diverse range of body types, ethnicities, and personal style. But rather than concerning herself with specific individual’s identities — the way a portraitist might — Selimbasic uses figuration to explore painterly questions of color, light and abstraction, as well as gender expression.

Selimbašić describes her paintings as often “crowded” with figures, sourced from photos of real-life friends, loved ones, and acquaintances. By layering bodies, she pushes beyond scenes of lifelike representation toward more abstract composition strategy. While the painter takes pleasure in illustrating her subjects’ tattoos, jewelry and tan lines, she typically keeps their faces hidden — or rendered with minimal detail. This anonymity has a democratizing effect. In the recent work On Fire (2023), her faceless figures include friends from Rome and people she met randomly at the beach. The bodies are arranged in horizontal bands, as though the figures were collaged together, erasing the illusion of depth. Selimbašić says she ignored “ordinary perspective,” which implies differing degrees of importance between subjects in the foreground and background. “I like to create a world where there is no hierarchy, and all my muses are at the same level,” she explains.

Her approach to color and light is similarly thoughtful. She uses color for its narrative potential, and aims to include all the hues present in skin — including violets, blues, and greens — in her works. When she uses flat color, by contrast, she does so to represent a light or object outside the picture plane. In I didn’t have the courage to dive (2023) — depicting a group of women swimming — the painter relishes in the play of light and color across water and skin. The pool water’s edge bisects her half-submerged figures, breaking up their curvaceous bodies into strange, seductive abstractions. A belly, a butt, a sliver of arm, float above the surface, tethered to the powerful bodies below. The painting encourages us to look beyond the superficial, to see beauty in human wholeness.