Daniela Markovic - visual artist
- Jan 26
- 4 min read
Daniela Markovic, from matter to resilience
Born in Rambouillet, near Paris, to a family of Serbian origin, Daniela Markovic grew up in a world where rigor, tradition, and hard work were cardinal values. Yet from an early age, she diverged from the framework. As a child, she drew, sculpted, painted. Art already imposed itself as a necessity, a vital breath. But this vocation, too free for family expectations, remained long in the background. She first chose a more conventional path: economics studies, pursued between Germany and England, where she lived for seven years. There she married and became the mother of a son, now a young adult. In 2010, she settled in Lausanne, near Lake Geneva, whose reflections and moods would become one of her recurring motifs.
Water, skin, matter: three words that sum up the essence of her work. But above all, it is her automata that mark a turning point in her practice. Hybrid forms between sculpture, painting, and installation, they translate the passage from emotion to movement, from wound to creation. A series of four to five automata emerged over a period of about two and a half years. The first took shape two weeks after a romantic breakup, after ten years of shared life. The shock then became creative energy. These sensitive machines, equipped with sound mechanisms and subtle movements, convey the emotional turmoil of a separation. Close to the spirit of Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) and Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002), these works explore movement as an extension of emotion, not in derision but in sincerity. "It had to move," she says. These animated sculptures become a metaphor for life after shock, for the heart that begins to beat again.
Crumpled paper, again and again, persists in her new works. It remains the symbol of what has been broken but continues to live, to breathe. For Daniela, nothing is ever lost: everything transforms, everything reinvents itself. Her themes—rupture, fragility, inner strength—unfold in forms that are always sensual, always human. Emotion is palpable there, contained in the very matter: paint, texture, sound.
Her two major series, Léman, roi de nos lacs (Geneva, King of Our Lakes) and À Fleur de peau (Skin Deep), embody the two sides of her universe—contemplation and wound, nature and human. In Léman, roi de nos lacs, she pays tribute to the power of landscape, to the shifting light of the lake, to its eternal transformation. Working with a palette knife, she superimposes thick layers that she scrapes and rubs until revealing the hidden depth of the surface. Her painting, both tactile and vibrant, captures the texture of water and light. Inspired by Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918), she uses bright and contrasting colors, playing with the sandy reliefs of the canvas. For her, nature becomes an inner mirror: the lake, a shifting face, sometimes calm, sometimes tormented.
But it is with the series À Fleur de peau that Daniela delivers her most intimate and moving part. Created on crumpled kraft paper, this series pays tribute to women from the world of prostitution. The bodies are fragile, powerful, marked by life. The paper, crumpled and irregular, becomes a metaphor for these existences: a surface never smooth, like skin traversed by scars. "Lola," for example, a half-naked woman, cigarette in hand, embodies this look at vulnerability and human dignity. Daniela paints these women with compassion, without judgment, and incorporates QR codes into her exhibitions leading to testimonies and music, notably by Syrano, to give voice to those we silence.
This choice of kraft paper, modest and raw, goes beyond the symbolic. Daniela also inscribes her own wounds there. Her works become catharsis: the pictorial gesture allows her to revisit her past, to transform the pain experienced in England into aesthetic matter. Each fold of the paper bears the trace of a scar, each warm or brown hue becomes healing skin. The artist evokes here resilience, the central theme of her work: an assumed fragility, made beautiful.
Regarding her training, she holds a bachelor's degree in Visual Arts and a master's in Visual Arts Research and Contemporary Creation, obtained later in life at the Sorbonne, which reinforces this articulation between thought and matter. In 2022, she exhibited À Fleur de peau at La Maison de la Femme in Lausanne and in Rambouillet, before joining the committee of Espace Artistes Femmes, where she participated in the first exhibition organized in its premises.
Through her series, Daniela explores the movements of the soul. Her work is made of contrasts, between the softness of gesture and the brutality of experience, between the brilliance of colors and the gravity of subjects. She paints humanity in its complexity, its imperfect beauty, its vulnerability. Each work is a fragment of life, an attempt to immortalize the moment when pain becomes light.
Today, Daniela continues to alternate between painting and sculpture, between the silence of paper and the mechanical noise of her automata. She pursues a constant dialogue with matter, which she kneads, scrapes, crumples, until making it alive.
Her work, both carnal and spiritual, speaks of rebirth: that of a woman, an artist, a being in search of balance. Between Geneva and skin, between the vibration of water and the scar of paper, Daniela paints life as it is—imperfect, shifting, and infinitely beautiful.
Dr. Marie Bagi
Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)
Published November 4, 2025
