About
Tanja Brnić is a South African visual artist whose work bridges fine art and architectural sensibilities. With a background in architectural technology and a longstanding practice in painting, her work engages themes of reflection, perception, memory, and place. With a Master of Fine Arts from the Witwatersrand University, her work transforms everyday moments, often captured through photographs, into layered, painterly reflections of lived experience.
Drawing from both personal experience and theoretical influences, her paintings often feature layered reflections, manipulated imagery, and moments of quiet introspection set within dynamic cityscapes. Her practice also includes commissioned works, ranging from expansive landscapes to intimate portraits, created for local and international clients.
Tanja’s artistic approach is marked by a clean, precise aesthetic shaped by her architectural training, yet remains grounded in the tactile, emotive qualities of oil painting and drawing. She is currently based in Croatia and has exhibited her work in galleries and institutions across South Africa.
Undergraduate Work
Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts
The Artists journey through Absent Presence
Tanja Brnić’s undergraduate work laid the conceptual and technical foundations of her artistic practice, with a particular focus on spatial awareness, material residue, and emotional memory. Her final year project, titled Absent Presence, engaged with themes of liminality, thresholds, and the tension between absence and presence. Set within her late father’s abandoned factory, the work became a personal and philosophical meditation on transitory spaces caught between past utility and an uncertain future.
Through installation, drawing, and observational study, Tanja explored the material buildup of dust, the weight of objects left behind, and the architecture of memory. The factory, as both physical site and metaphor, became a “liminal space”, a threshold state resonant with personal history, loss, and unresolved potential. Sketchbooks, collected items, and the gradual act of clearing the space were framed as acts of archiving, grieving, and meaning-making.
This body of work demonstrates an early engagement with the aesthetics of stillness, temporality, and the poetic tension between decay and preservation. These explorations of in-betweenness and spatial ambiguity laid the groundwork for Tanja’s later inquiries in her postgraduate series Construct of Reality.
