The exhibition in Vienna is an art competition — the 4th Toolip Art Contest 2025 — featuring artists from around the world.
The purpose of the competition is to provide broader visibility and to foster connections within the artistic community.
It is worth highlighting that a professional jury of ten members selected 100 of the best works from the 500 submitted, among which are my two pieces: My Heart and Birth.
Birth, mixed media, 100 × 100 cm
My Heart, mixed media, Ø 90 cm
These works are not merely aesthetic moments, but thought maps of inner worlds — structures that invite perceptual exploration.
The artist’s visual language is rooted in coloristic abstraction, the tactility of the surface, and the interplay of full and empty spaces.
Ana’s paintings are a constant play between the known and the unknown — between the figurative and the dreamlike.
In the world of painting, this means a transition from the conceptually figurative to the abstract, from the narrative to the experiential.
Her color palettes are emotionally charged, dynamic, and full of contrasts.
Two Pieces, One Story
Although different in energy, these paintings belong to the same inner world.
One represents the core — the heart, the emotional center, the source from which everything originates. The other represents the leap — the first breath, the first movement, the first form that separates from the core and expands into space.
Unconventional materials play a key role in this.
They not only create relief but also convey a sense of presence. It is as if these works exist between painting and sculpture. This approach allows the emotion to be not only seen but physically experienced. The textures reveal the dynamics of inner processes: fractures, tensions, expansions, and releases.
Together, My Heart and Birth create a story of inner transformation — from feeling to creation, from darkness to color, from confinement to openness. It is a story that reminds us that every process, no matter how messy or painful, leads to something new.
Perhaps this is precisely why these works resonate so strongly: they are at once deeply personal and completely universal. In them, we recognize our own struggles, our beginnings, our potential.
My Heart and Birth: Two Faces of Inner Processes
Art sometimes speaks most profoundly when it transcends the boundaries of classical representation and opens a space for feeling. The two paintings I present today — My Heart and Birth — were created by the same hand, yet stem from completely different inner impulses. Their power lies not in the subject, but in the approach: in the way material, form, and color carry something deeper than the surface itself.
My Heart — A Surface That Breathes Color
My Heart is a circular composition in color, but its story does not begin with the circle itself — it begins in what unfolds within it. Although flat in structure, this painting seems as if its inner forms are expanding toward the viewer. Shapes flow into one another, lean, glide, and release.
There are no sharp boundaries — everything is in motion.
Both vivid and subdued colors create a rhythm reminiscent of emotional vibration. Blue, yellow, pink, and green are not merely decorative layers here; they are energetic traces, small maps of inner states.
To call this work My Heart does not mean to depict a heart, but to depict a state of the heart.
A heart that is open. One that does not hide contrasts but transforms them into a composition that breathes within its flatness. Here, the heart is not born through texture, but through color — through vibration.
Birth — Texture as Life Force
In complete contrast stands Birth: a black-and-white composition with pronounced yellow accents, a work that lives through its material.
While My Heart speaks in color, Birth speaks in textures.
Here, the material rises, cracks, builds, and grows. The surface is rough, the folds tangible, and the composition feels like a frozen moment of intense transformation.
The yellow emerges like the first light — something just appearing, just beginning to take form. The black-and-white contrasts emphasize the drama of the process, as if the death of one form becomes the birth of another.
Birth does not depict an object; it depicts the energy of transition. It is as if we witness the moment when life, thought, or pure dynamism forms out of unordered material.
Two Pieces, Two Languages — One Story
Although completely different in expression, these two works share the same axis: the exploration of inner states through material.
“My Heart” uses color and flatness as a language of softness, vibration, and dissolution.
“Birth” uses texture and contrast as a language of strength, tension, and beginnings.
One is a whisper, the other a strike.
One is an opening, the other an eruption.
One is a state, the other a process.
Together, these works create a bridge between the emotional and the physical, between the inner pulse and the material moment of creation. They remind us that our inner processes are complex: sometimes fluid and colorful, sometimes rough and eruptive — but always authentic.
Perhaps this is what is most beautiful about this duo: every beginning has its heart, and every heart has its birth.
