Loribelle Spirovski Uses Art To Understand Her Immigrant Background

Australian visual artist Loribelle Spirovski uses paint as her medium to create artworks centering around portraiture. Themes of color and space strongly inform the nature of her work, which is characterized by the contrasting elements of photorealism, pop art, and surrealism.

Spirovski is born to a Filipino mother and Yugoslav father and moved to Australia at a young age. Art had always been a mechanism for escapism, and a way to process the profound effect that moving countries had on her. This feeling is translated into her paintings; each displays a feeling of melancholy and otherness. “Over the past few years, I have found that I have become more and more drawn to the tension of a space – they need to fill it, the need to understand its strange sentience. As a child of immigrants and an immigrant myself”, she continues, “My fixation on space is a particularly meaningful one”. She admits she uses painting to find herself within the space of a canvas—whether through the portrait of a person she’s encountered, or the portrait of someone she’s only imagined. “These indirect self-portraits are distillations of my identity as a young woman, with all of my fixations, obsessions and anxieties”. Her body of work can be split into two categories, both of which examine the superficial layers and hidden depths of the human condition. ‘Light’ paintings with vibrant colors of both figures and landscapes, and ‘dark’ paintings that utilize a more somber palette to depict figures.

All images © Loribelle Spirovski