Contour of Absence | Mixed Media Wool and Acrylic Abstract Artwork, 2025

Lada Bozhina  

Lada Bozhina is a contemporary abstract artist based in Budva, Montenegro, whose work explores memory, migration, displacement, and the emotional reconstruction of home. Born into a family of artists — with her mother, father, and grandfather all working in the arts — she developed an early connection to visual culture and completed an eight-year education at a children’s art school before later studying interior design.

For more than a decade, Lada has worked professionally in interior design and decoration, an experience that strongly influences her artistic language. Her artworks combine layered abstraction, tactile surfaces, and conceptual use of materials, creating works that function both as emotional landscapes and spatial objects. Texture plays a central role in her practice, transforming fragments, found materials, and traces of lived experience into multidimensional compositions.

At the core of Lada’s work is the idea of the “suitcase of memory” — the emotional archive people carry through migration and personal transformation. Through abstraction and material layering, she preserves fragments of places, identities, and memories that continue to exist within new environments. Her paintings become visual spaces where loss, adaptation, warmth, and belonging coexist.

Her visual language merges contemporary conceptual abstraction with architectural sensitivity and postmodern landscape references. The works often balance restraint and emotional intensity, combining muted tones, physical textures, and fragmented surfaces that evoke erosion, reconstruction, and continuity.

Lada has participated in international and group exhibitions, presented solo projects in galleries and independent art spaces, and collaborated with interior designers. She is currently presenting her second solo exhibition in Podgorica, Montenegro, while developing a new body of work focused on migration, memory, and the reuse of materials for upcoming international open calls.