Amer Kobaslija is one of three artists being featured by The Baker Museum of Art in its 12th Annual "Florida Contemporary" exhibition. His paintings explore the landscape, people and history of Florida, demonstrating the Bosnian-born artist’s complicated relationship with the state he calls home. Museum Director Courtney McNeil provides context.
“This is his body of work that he titles ‘The Florida Diaries,’” said McNeil. “So he has a bit of an outsider’s perspective on the state, having grown up not only not in the state, but not even in this country, and is fascinated by all of the strange juxtapositions that he’s found here.”
An example of what McNeil is talking about is a large painting of a tree covered with brightly colored inner tubes.
“He first spotted this tree in real life at a rafting company, where you could rent a raft to go float down a river and was struck by the strange juxtaposition of this garishly colored plastic on the natural form of this tree trunk,” McNeil explained. “He also felt like it has sort of an ominous spirit to it as well, almost reminding him of a lynching tree with the way that the inner tubes are dangling off, and it’s a form that he comes back to again and again, and you can see it in the background of some of his other paintings, as well.”
All of the paintings in “The Florida Diaries” suggest that a place can be simultaneously beautiful and melancholy. In them Kobaslija juxtaposes cheerful colors, lush landscapes and the likenesses of friends and neighbors with gloomy subtext about environmental degradation and underlying social inequality, which have been part of Kobaslija’s experience with the Sunshine State.
Kobaslija will join fellow exhibitors Marielle Plasir and Cynthia Mason for a panel discussion on April 18.
"Florida Contemporary" is on view through June 29, 2025.
For WGCU News, this is Tom Hall.
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Of all of Kobaslija’s works on view in Florida Contemporary, Museum Director Courtney McNeil’s favorite is “Plein Air Painter.”
“I love the large scale, the aerial perspective and the juxtaposition of this very immediate foreground with the teeny, tiny landscape in the background. He’s thinking about the great romantic painters of hundreds of years ago and how they would paint these very romanticized and idealized landscapes, and thinking about the sublime in nature and how it was an escape from the trials and tribulations of the world.”
“Plein Air Painter” stands for the proposition that continued development will inevitably lead to the replacement of pristine landscape with giant garbage heaps, landfills and sprawling residential and commercial centers.
Kobaslija includes himself in the composition. That’s him at the top of the garbage heap. It’s reminiscent of Thomas Cole’s “Oxbow” (1836), which includes in his sublime landscape a small self portrait of Cole at his easel.
References to Western art appear throughout Kobaslija’s compositions. For example, in “After Watteau,” he includes a uniformed police officer as a stand-in for the sad clown depicted in “Watteau’s Pierrot” (c.1718-19).
In a new body of work, the Jacksonville-based Kobaslija depicts the absurd, often grotesque scenes that you encounter on the side of a busy highway.
“He’s even gone so far as to paint these on a metal surface that has rounded corners that echoes a road sign that you’d see,” McNeil noted.
McNeil also pointed out that many of Kobaslija’s paintings are populated with his friends and neighbors. One, “Alexander Springs,” portrays the artist’s wife and infant daughter at a national forest in central Florida. “Others depict people that he knows here in the state of Florida,” said McNeil.
“So he has a deep and abiding love for the state of Florida, but he’s also not afraid to highlight its quirks or what he sees as its shortcomings in many ways,” McNeil observed. In each, he is motivated by a curiosity to better understand and portray the complexities and incongruities of his adopted home.
In addition to the visual content and social commentary underlying Kobaslija’s compositions, his works complement the gallery space in which they are exhibited, particularly the top of the Chihuly chandelier that the space wraps around.
“That’s the idea, right?” McNeil remarked. “Even the brushstrokes in these paintings play nicely with the gestural style of the glass in the Chihuly” and its circles and orbs.
“Amer was a Bosnian refugee who left his homeland and spent time living in refugee camps in Germany before coming to the United States in the 1990s,” McNeil noted. “He has since established a really thriving artistic practice and he’s also a professor.”
He left Bosnia in 1993 after the outbreak of the Bosnian War.
While living in a refugee camp near Nuremberg, Kobaslija studied art at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.
Kobaslija moved to Florida in 1997. He received his BFA from Ringling College of Art and his MFA from Montclair State University.
His work can be found in multiple public collections, including The de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara; the Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Brussels, Belgium; Staten Island Museum in New York and the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
He is a recipient of The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (2005) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2006).
In 2013, he was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship.
Kobaslija is currently a faculty member of the University of Central Florida, where he teaches painting in the university’s School of Visual Arts and Design.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.