In the paintings of Sead Emrić, there is a desire for a creative interweaving of time and space created from visions in which one can sense the author’s obsession to build a complete and distinctive work. Various forms of expression are united by a unique emotion with prevailing bright tones that, despite the chaos, leave an impression of cheerfulness and optimism. The paintings act as a miraculous play of a spirit that lives on its own energy, which is a clear sign that Emrić is finding a personal creative stamp. From drawing to drawing, it is evident that Emrić is not satisfied with what he has achieved and that he adds to his sensibility with a continuous and self-effacing, always passionate and curious spirit.

All of Emrić’s paintings belong to the abstract and amorphous artistic form, in which there is a never-ending game of things and phenomena, a special cult of viewing, which is why we rightly assume that with professional guidance, persistence and more permanent work, Emrić can achieve more than what is offered.

Rašid Durić, Banja Luka, 1989.

The paintings on canvas, made in the manner of abstract intimism, reveal an artist who is intensely silent about the reality of the Holocaust of his people.

Therefore, his color is muted and his handwriting is varied, sometimes it is folded into flats, then straightened into strips, and then curled into the most subtle arabesque. In some places, the movement accelerates as if it were about places of greater flow of energy, stronger pulsation of life, and then it descends into an adagio, leading us with a calmer rhythm through areas where we can take a breather, until we are once again engulfed by a restless torrent.

Nermin Delić , Bihać, 1994.

A characteristic feature of Sead Emrić’s works of art is the absence of recognizable forms from life. This manner of expression in the art community is usually explained as an abstract style. The impression, however, when observing Emrić’s works, is that this is a consequence of the artist’s need to convey observations from the world of appearances and events of which he is a contemporary, to the public in the most discreet possible way, i.e. the desire to exclude any form of arrogance and unquestioning suggestion. So Emrić’s “abstraction” is actually just a language of expression, with which he communicates his thoughts and feelings to the audience in an affirmative way. This forces him to the core to be less direct in that communication, but at the same time protects him from misinterpretation. However, although without figurative content, Emrić’s works already at first glance express the «genius loci», that is, the spirit of the place, in space and time, as its dimensions.

Enisa Jusuć and Mirko Jandrić, Bihać, 1994.

S ead Emrić belongs to the ranks of those artists of ours who have expressed their belonging to the culture and tradition of their people and their country through their entire work. Speaking more specifically, Emrić, realizing that Bosniak culture can only be modern when it reconciles with tradition, based his work and way of expression on the symbols he found on various monuments of the Bosnian past.

The symbols in Emrić’s works, which emerge against his will, mostly coming from the depths of the centuries, play one role and fulfill one function: the role is special and coincides with his monumental value, while the function is also to transcend history. In this way, Emrić’s symbols are an ancestral call… They are from yesterday and from today, they are a transmitted message. Thus, in Emrić’s works, a guide can be found to unravel the eternal Bosniak questions: who are we, where are we from, where are we and where are we going?

                                                         Niazija Maslak, Bihać, 1996.

U mjetnik in his transposition came close to revealing the questions raised by rounding off the vision of his own world.

With condensed symbolism, arrangement of volumes, pasty smears and compositional elaboration of the inner structure of his thoughts, Emrić presents himself as a creator who, without a doubt, is capable of performing and realizing the structural solidity of his work as a whole as an above all engaged relationship with time and the social environment in general.

                                                            Nermin Delić, Bihać, 1996.

His Serhat is revealed by the dynamic relationship of natural forms, dramatic profiles of those forms, stinginess and opulence at the same time. Through emotional maturation, he translated the geomorphological forms into the morphology of his painting, and just as a sculptor frees his form from a boulder, so Emrić freed the bearers of the visual spectrum from the geomorphological substrate, freed the surfaces of different geometric formulations that follow the interior of the geomorphological structure, and thus obtained a surface divided into a series geometric fields of different shapes. He transformed the surface of the canvas into a dynamic spectrum that in itself excites, and with his different directions he created rhythmic scores whose musical relationships are constantly changing and do not allow our gaze to calm down, satisfy and lose further interest in communication.

All this suggests that at the base of his painting lies a graphic constitution of a painting that could exist in pure light valerianism. But Sead Emrić wants more than his image, the love for his Serhat is not conceived only in the imaginary one, in his Serhat resides a man, a man with his ups and downs, with his existential problems and his historical destiny. This existential drama and historical fate are embedded in the morphology of the environment by some underground currents, the environment is identified with the historical fate of man, they become indistinguishable from each other and by this indistinguishability they are recognizable…

Vojislav Vujanović , Sarajevo, 1997.

The cycle of paintings that is before us is an attempt to escape into metaphysics, the supernatural, which in fact the name itself says…

Nermin Delić, Bihać, 1997.

I would call it a small artistic miracle that takes place under the old town of Bužim, which rises on one of the many hills that surround Bužim, thus making it somewhat mysterious, in any case exceptional.

The essence of Ajvaz-deda’s prayer and his dream about the clash of two rams, a stream of white color, cuts into the amorphousness of the rocky matter whose internal monolith breaks into two material images that would like to prevent the stream of spiritual power of a distant and strange dream, but that power, precisely in it becomes supernatural to its spirituality, it separates the two forces and embeds itself as a miracle in that space, creating a door through which, according to legend, the saving water flowed.

It is the secret speech of Sead Emrić’s painting, which cannot be sensed in its materialization itself, but in its context, in its secret signs that Sead incorporated into the body of the painting…

Vojislav Vujanović, Sarajevo, 2000.

E mrić’s painting is of differentiated, lively color and free strokes that do not strive for “objectification”, that is, they do not strive to fix visual signs. Emrić, therefore, does not start from the basic elements and their relationships in the order of the “building of light”, from the metaphysical basis of the world that sees in reality itself geometric forms and comparable, mathematically expressible relationships that are reduced to measure and, in relation to art, to aesthetic measure , it starts from the original artistic and poetic anthropomorphism, from the artistic “appropriation” of the world and even identification with space. But what kind of space is that? There is cosmic, physical, cultural, “living space” and a large number of other spaces, which means not abstract, constructive and constructed space, but lived and experienced space as experienced time (temps vecu), speaking phenomenologically from the “world of life”. How, after all that has been said, should we understand and interpret Emrić’s painting work, if the current critical terminology did not already help us, and the painterly poetics of this author is bounded by a border and visual abstraction on at least three levels: idea, mythical and religious representation, exact fantasy, etc. ..

Almir Zalihić,Cazin, 2000.

In the latest cycle of paintings, he actually created a chronology of his emotional and mental preoccupations that arose during his first meeting with the Seer, that eternal secret that so many artists pursued, searched for hidden truths and embodied them on their canvases. The basic metaphor of that experience is a pebble, not as a material fact, but as the perfection of design and the ultimate degree of completion because, if there was another form of perfection, it is certain that Nature and Water would use that perfection, and not the perfection of a pebble. But the perfection of the pebble has another dimension, besides the immediate existential one: it has become a building element of the Počitelji monument, it empties its existence in order to become the bearer of the Počitelji’s existence. With this, his immediate existence is multiplied and thus he also reaches the third stage of his existence – the artistic existence of a painting. All these existences are graded in the picture, they support each other, they create a visual spectrum. The first level of existence, a beautiful existence, reduced to a spiritual spot of whiteness, changes its position from picture to picture, depending on the overall relationships in the given exhibit. From this position, she emanates from herself a hidden energy that breaks down into a colored spectrum of circles and semicircles, swirling vines (a magical play of lines that extend across the entire width of the picture), creating a relief, however imaginary, as much as it is alive and immediate, a relief that becomes a substrate formative forms into which the melodicity of the intellectual space dissolves. In that melody, occasionally, some apparently disparate tones appear, tones of dreamy cypresses that are nothing but fragments of a dream…

Vojislav Vujanović, Sarajevo 2001.

S ead Emrić, already recognized a long time ago, builds a completely new expression that is almost impossible to find a parallel. In the coloplet of virtuosically described forms of this layered composition, the specific pebble stands out, which Emrić enthrones to the iconographic motif of Pocitelj. The floating pebbles, rhythmically arranged on the “dragon” of the canvas, compose an ode to the suffering city…

Lejla Mehulić, Zagreb, 2001.

The objective experience of what he found in Počitelj aroused such strong inspiration that an artistic response “simply had to follow”…

Elida Čaušević, Sarajevo, 2001.

In the internal development of his painting, he reached a stage where the object is no longer manifested in any way in his painting. He has sunk to full awareness into the inner dark spaces of his consciousness and all his subconscious, he is no longer looking for support outside of himself, that support is now found in himself. He depicts this support as a powerful departure from the vulgarization of the world around him, he reacts, with his artistic nerve, to the forces that strip man, dehumanize him and leave behind him desolation and nothingness. From the predominantly light tonality in which he formulated his artistic world until now, he adopted a dark tonality, darkened the horizons, and for a fuller expression he began to use certain symbols, the symbol of a bird taken from two sources: from stećak and from Islamic mysticism, Sufism, birds Simurgh.

He works on the realization of the painting almost in a laboratory, developing methods of painting using some tools that, by their nature, do not belong in the art arsenal itself. True, in his earlier cycles he also introduced such means, but they were, for the most part, based on intuition, now they are fully conscious and with a clearly set goal of what they want to achieve. One of these elements is the grid, which is intended for a double role: it achieves a kind of texture of the background, then a dynamic relief of the picture surface is obtained, and, finally, in some pictures, it forms the conceptual backbone of the picture, which enters into a complementary relationship with the dark color. and with the symbol of the Simurga or the bird from the stećak.

His consciousness sharpens its critical attitude towards the reality in which it finds itself, judges it with its excited sensus, does not agree with its relationship to the human, so severely insulted in the last few decades, especially when it comes to the national corps to which it belongs. The Simurgh is a bird that confronts the world with its meaningful edge, the boundary line between life and death, the net becomes a symbol of the breakdown of the world on one side and on the other side, with the fact that on the other side are those who carry the preserved human charges that, in on this occasion, led to another visible temptation…

                                               Vojislav Vujanović, Sarajevo, 2001.

S ead Emrić is a “veteran” of the Počitelj colony, and this year he presented himself with an interesting work that evokes the spirit of old Počitelj…

Maja Radević, Sarajevo, 2002.

And if he doesn’t want to transfer what he sees to his canvases, he looks for ways to penetrate beneath the epidermal layer, to grasp hidden structures and to build on them his sensibility inclined to modern artistic morphology, with the removal of narrative syllables, to look for artistic solutions…

This artist sometimes looks for solutions in his paintings through pure intuition…

But this, in its own way, testifies to the originality of his creative power, his talent. ..

Vojislav Vujanović, Cazin, 2002.

S ead Emrić is a painter of the spirit of the Krajina, in the way rhapsodies did before him…

Quiet by nature, he, in conducting a dialogue with his time, becomes extremely talkative, managing to extract from the chaos of the events of his own time that substantial extract with which he materializes his time, turning it into a historical pledge for future times…

These pictures are full of inner anxiety and in their immediate presentation they are offered as a wall in front of which we have found ourselves and we are unable to continue our path of humanity whose mission we have accepted to realize in this terrible time of ours…

Vojislav Vujanović,  Bosnian Krupa, 2003.

Chaos that can be seen on the canvas is a mirror of the soul. Later, when the painter emerges from the mess, the conquest of whiteness on the canvas is therapeutically calming. As the chaos calms down, the balance in the picture is restored and cheerfulness emerges over the chaos. Exactly this sequence is the basic meaning and beauty of Emrić’s rise as an artist.

The story that the painting builds about the tragedy of Bosnia is also an inspiration, which leads him to research…

                                                       Amir Talic,Sanski Most, 2003.

S ead Emrić is one of the last modern researchersof Bosnian painting. He is a researcher, and a craftsmanin the noblest sense of the term.

Emrić investigates thematicallyBosnian tradition, artisanally (expertly) shaping it into a painting. At the same time, tradition is never folklorized, and craft design is clichéd, but /post/modernized…

Zilhad Kljucanin , Bihać, 2003.

And from the chaos of the black primordial beginning, from the basic color of the cosmos – strands of primordial separated colors of unrepeatable freshness found the hand of Emrić, who began to describe the signs of a living, equally convincingly revealed and hidden world that constitute man’s being and his world. How unusual was his series of Letters sent down from the sky of the Beloved, how disturbing was the joy of the entire collection’s blue thematic explosion of that unforgettable Ajvatovice!

Emrić’s paintings are truly free-flowing and deeply intimate at the same time.

Ibrahim Kajan, Mostar, 2003.

The only open suggestion of Emrić’s art is that he transcends history, his own and that of his people, with his artistic sensibility and rational decision, based on dedicated and persistent research and deciphering the code written in the soil, in memory, in being…

I don’t know why, but the meeting with the subject corpus of Emrić’s exhibition the day after the official opening evoked in me the memory of an artistic circle from a whole decade ago about the meaning and significance of applied procedures in abstract creativity. In the end, the only thing left clear is that everything is irrelevant except the intention. Up until now, I didn’t need a statement about such a court, and now Emrić’s canvases have inadvertently pulled out the approval of such a court from my subconscious, probably because his intention to preserve his own Bosnian code, despite all the abstractions, is obvious…

Mubera Maslić, Zagreb, 2004.

S ead Emrić often finds his inspiration in the history of Bosnia, building apotheosis of his Serhat, and introducing into his paintings the spiritual achievements of ancestors – stećak and intertwined motifs on their faces to show the powerful growth of civilizational achievements on this soil. It works in cycles, one of which is also dedicated to Ajvatovica. Now he finds his inspiration in the tragedy of Srebrenica. He recognizes the speech of evil, but, surprisingly, softens his intonation, speaks with a spirit of nobility. And it is this nobility that resonates even more poignantly in us. To speak warmly about evil and with the vocabulary of evil – that is the greatness of this artist that fascinates. With his work, he ennobles us and talks about the tragic. It is rare for any artist to succeed… Vojislav Vujanović,  Sarajevo, 2005.

Sead Emrić is a historian and an artist, deeply rooted yet not burdened within cultural tradition of Bosnia and Hercegovina. Most of the paintings presented here are trom thematic opus named „Summa Bosniaca“, in which through reduction and filtration of visions and emotions he delivers layers and forms atill recognizable as fragments of collective memory, as temperature and texture of color, as all those ancient writings that werw used in the territory of Bosnia, as scenes from continuous ancestral dreaming…

                                                  Kristina Babošek, Ljubljana, 2007.

His understanding of things is multifaceted. We should distinguish each of his endeavors not only as an original visualization of the world, but also as a conquest of the neglected space of personal identity. Emrić does this by strengthening our ties with history and memory, events and epics, with ourselves, with the facts that make us up, because part of the labyrinth that we create with our work, movement and actions also belongs to other people, even in the same way when we we set off through free space without restrictions, spotting a point on our map that could have a memory-significant and thus ritualistic meaning that essentially marks us. In the realization of his ideas, Sead Emrić has a deeply installed painterly and aesthetic measure that stops him at every place that could turn into inappropriate. In fact, that measure comes from his humanistic, meditatively reflective being, which was shaped by the long suffering of a people and the renunciation of his being…

Atif Kujundžić, Lukavac, 2010.

The spectrum of the artistic work of Sead Emrić, an artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina, is not only a reflection of the special characters of the three peoples from his homeland, but also a reflection of the characters of the three religions from the Book. Transformations or conversions were already part of Genesis as recorded in the Torah of the Old Testament. Chaos was transformed into order in the Universe and with the Creation of Man, feelings became part of the World – and thus knowledge (Knowledge), as the price of expulsion from Paradise. Salvation by Jesus Christ, written in the New Testament, opens the gates of Paradise again, but only to those who are pardoned at the Last Judgment. Muhammad, who in the Qur’an recognizes Jesus, in Arabic Isa, as a Prophet, describes Life and the End of the World. According to his prophecy, this will happen when Jesus, the Christian Prophet, appears on the Isa Minaret of the Omayyadden Mosque in Damascus. The wide spectrum of Sead Emrić’s artistic work is therefore described by Transformations and Feelings, stretching from Genesis to the End of the World, which is described in the Book of the Three Religions. His paintings also reflect the characteristics of the three peoples from his homeland.

                                  dr. Horn Walter, Klagenfurt 2011.

Sead Emrić is a painter whose interest does not stop at the interpretation of reality. The artist here does something particularly brave and fundamentally paradoxical: he establishes the landscape of the painting as something separated from reality. The edge of the picture, sometimes double, sometimes triple, represents that border that does not allow reality to penetrate into the world of “art”. The artistic is recognized as the appearance of symbols, as language and as expression. Sead Ernić follows Paul Klee’s advice on the essence of art in the 20th century: «Art does not imitate the visible, it makes it visible.»

This, in fact, is all that Sead Emrić offers on his canvases: he makes visible what lies beyond reality and what only a true artist can reach, and yet, few persist in this until the end.

Sead fully belongs to this most important heritage of modern art, which is evident from each of his paintings. The artist “plays on the edge” here, without ever falling into the banal, already seen or the routine artisanal multi-production. An amazing imagination is at work here, too rich with ideas. Each picture in itself is a challenge for interpretation. The eye jumps from detail to detail, guided by symbols, labyrinths of rhythm and tonal color scales.

This art is above all a courageous insistence on the emergence of a personal inner world…

Igor Popović, Zadar, 2013.

Exhibition by Sead Emrić, Luč v tema: »Art does not reflect what we see, but opens our eyes so that we can see it easily.«

On a hot summer afternoon on Tuesday, May 6, 2014, we opened an exhibition of a Bosnian artist in the EF gallery. Author of the exhibition, Sead Emric, has exhibited in Slovenia several times since 2007, and as he said, he always likes to come back to us. He received many awards for his work, both in his homeland and abroad.

When asked why he decided to create abstract works, he answers that “the pictures are not completely abstract, because there is a lot of symbolism in them.” In his works, he deliberately does not depict real life, but tries to express ideas. “Art does not reflect what we see, but opens our eyes so that we can see it.” In his canvases, Emrić wants to go beyond the picture frame by creating two or three virtual transitions or frames within the canvas.

The artist looks for inspiration in history and culture. His homeland is culturally rich and diverse, so he looks for inspiration in the cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other present cultures.

Sead Emrić’s abstract art is recognizable by its strong colors and message symbolism.

Lana Grunčić Krajnc, Ljubljana, 2014.

Sead Emrić painter artist. How to briefly summarize the complexity of seekers, researchers, lovers of Bosnia since its existence. It is with this persistence and consistency that he reveals Bosnia with drawings, graphics and paintings in oil or acrylic, with woven threads and gauze that reveal its wounds. It shows us secretive, blurred, layered, staid, proud, “defiant of sleep”. With each of his works, he asks us to recognize the precincts of him and the deposited mark hidden by secret beauty. He is a painter who, in the mysterious knot of Bosnia, harmonizes opposites and reconciles extremes, and this is exactly the beauty and charm of the present and future of Sead Emrić’s painting.

Enver Mandžić, Tuzla, 2015.

Sead Emric, from Bosnia, discovered on Facebook, like many painter friends. Excellent painters everywhere, real ones, like him who pursue a sincere adventure, possessing a solid technique. He is a born builder who juxtaposes and fits together elements, knowing how to make the margins and textures vibrate, working with light, transparencies and large colored and patinated masses like walls with great sensitivity.

Jean-Philippe Rauzet

Sead Emrić, an academic painter from Bosnia, always likes to return to Slovenia. He has already had quite a few successful exhibitions here. In the language of painting, he expresses ideas that originate from his discovery, knowledge and monitoring of the history and cultural heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He connects all this wealth of the past into a multi-layered conglomerate, which tends towards abstraction, but in which we still perceive landscape and still-life elements. In terms of art, his works are very noble. They represent not only a tribute to the cultural wealth of his milieu, but also an original dialog of all this with Western European art-historical styles, among which we feel art nouveau, art nouveau and others. In multi-layered, technically filigree art creations, two different spirits mix and communicate in a perfect, balanced way. The coloring with a cultural touch, with strong color values, among which red and gold are indispensable, is complemented by an excellent, fluid drawing. The specificity also stems from the structures that give the pictorial surface a special charm and open up a wealth of artistic effects. Colors also acquire new values on their surface. Beneath the surface, symbolically meaningful and eternally relevant messages live.

Anamarija Stibilj Šajn, Logatec 2016.