Amer Kobašlija
37 Views of Rama
30 April – 13 May 2026
Exhibition extended: April 30 – May 22, 2026
Artist Talk: 7 May at 18:00, free admission
National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina
The exhibition 37 Views of Rama by contemporary Bosnian artist Amer Kobašlija will open at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina on 30 April 2026. The exhibition presents a cycle of paintings created in 2024 and 2025, inspired by the landscape of Lake Rama and its natural and historical layers.
The series 37 Views of Rama is conceived as a painterly exploration of a space that appears at once real and displaced, familiar yet elusive. Through motifs of water that recedes and returns, the artist opens a field for reflecting on time, memory, and the traces of the past that remain hidden beneath the surface. The cycle can be read as both a personal and a collective journey—a recognition of one’s own history within a landscape that belongs simultaneously to everyone and to no one.
Writing about this body of work, Miljenko Jergović observes:
“How did Amer Kobašlija eventually arrive in Rama? The answer is probably banal. All of us arrive somewhere we never intended to go, and then begin to do or create something we had not planned. We are shaped by a place and by our own reflection within it. That is how Amer began to draw and paint Rama. Before him was an impressive landscape. There is something in it of those generalized, almost fairy-tale-like Kunisada landscapes. He encountered that deep and dark Andrić-like Bosnia, which, like me, he had never seen before our wars and its Day of Judgment. At the same time, he neither saw nor cared to see the geographical kitsch of tourist photo monographs […] Amer saw in Rama not only a world in which he could recognize himself, but perhaps also a metaphor for his own life. And for many of our lives! Or perhaps I only imagine it so?”
As art historian Feđa Gavrilović points out, in Kobašlija’s work Lake Rama becomes a space where opposites meet—between the real and the imagined, the personal and the universal, nature and culture—a space in which the painter seeks and finds a sense of wholeness.
The artist himself describes this cycle as a visual chronicle of landscape and experience: through layers of water and the traces left after its withdrawal, the paintings become a space where personal memory and the history of place intertwine. For Kobašlija, painting is not merely the depiction of a moment, but a way of preserving and transmitting experience—as a trace of something that once was and still endures.
Amer Kobašlija was born in Banja Luka. During the war, in 1993, he left his homeland for a refugee camp in Nuremberg, Germany. While there, as a visiting student, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. In 1997, he emigrated to the United States, where he completed his undergraduate studies in painting and printmaking at Ringling College of Art and Design, and later earned his MFA from Montclair State University in New Jersey in 2005. Today, he lives and works between Florida and Japan, his wife’s country of origin, and is a Professor of Painting at the University of Central Florida.
The Sarajevo exhibition is part of a broader project that will subsequently be presented at the City Gallery in Ljubuški. The project has been realized with the support of the Rama community, whose members recognized both its artistic and cultural value, as well as its potential to connect people through shared space and heritage.
Biography
Born in Banja Luka, Amer Kobašlija left war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 for a refugee camp in Nuremberg, Germany. During his stay in Germany, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf as a visiting student. In 1997, he emigrated to the United States, where he earned a degree in painting and printmaking from Ringling College of Art and Design, and completed his graduate studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey in 2005. He currently lives and works between Florida and Japan, and is a full professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.
He is the recipient of several prestigious international awards, including the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has held numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New Orleans, Orlando, Naples, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Paris, and Switzerland. Since 2006, he has had nine solo exhibitions at the renowned George Adams Gallery in New York, including the traveling retrospective Amer Kobašlija: Places, Spaces (2015–2016), accompanied by a comprehensive monograph. In 2025, a traveling exhibition Amer Kobašlija: Paintings was presented in Bosnia and Herzegovina, accompanied by a bilingual monograph, marking the artist’s first exhibition in his country of birth.
His works are included in the collections of the U.S. Government (Art in Embassies program), the Consulate General of Japan in New York, Musée de Sasset, Hunter Museum of American Art, Greenville County Museum of Art, G.U.C. Collection, Middlebury Museum of Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Rollins Museum of Art, Stadt Sammlung Brig, Staten Island Museum, The Flag Art Foundation, and TOA Tokyo, among others. His exhibitions have been reviewed in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Art in America, ArtNews, Art & Antiques, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, New York Magazine, The New York Sun, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Florida Times-Union, Kunstbulletin, and The Japan Times.