Mihaela Rašica

Mihaela Rašica (Dubrovnik, 1997) is a Croatian painter of the younger generation who lives and works in Zagreb. At the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb, she graduated in Visual Culture in 2023 and in Painting in 2024, in the class of Professor Matko Vekić. Her practice is devoted to traditional painting techniques, and her motifs return again and again to light and colour — understood not only as visual phenomena, but also as metaphysical and spiritual ones. She frames expressively painted figures and simple, everyday scenes within abstracted colouristic compositions, while unusual lighting lends them a sense of wonder. Her painting builds on the legacy of French Post-Impressionism and American Figurative Expressionism, with strong influences from the colourist painting tradition of Dubrovnik, where she comes from. She has held several solo exhibitions in Croatia and one in Portugal, where she completed her professional internship as a member of the collective Mais uno + 1!, and has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her cycle "Sky Above Dubrovnik", in which personal memories intertwine with the landmarks and collective memory of her native city, was presented in Dubrovnik in 2025 and in Zagreb in 2026. She received the Kontrapunkt Award at the 7th Croatian Biennial of Painting and the Croatian Association of Artists (HDLU) Award for Best Young Artist of 2025. Alongside painting she writes poetry and has published two collections of poems, "Strune i stihije" (2020) and "Grimiz, kristal i sol" (2023).