Maja Krstic is an Amsterdam-based conceptualist driven by perfectionism.
She’s an artist, a fashion designer and last but not least, a mother.

Maja Krstic’s Ensembles is our latest exhibition at X BANK, on view at X BANK
until January 2020.With her collection, she’s giving the store a new look.
In addition to this, we did an experiment: Krstic made her longest one-line
drawing all around our spiral staircase. Her one-line portraits connect different
beings into an inseparable entity.

Starting out, Krstic was full of eagerness and hungriness for a career.
During her 10-year career in fashion, she always took on a little bit more
than she could handle. This combined with her perfectionism brought her
really far really fast. For example, she worked as head designer for the premium
collection of Scotch&Soda.

After becoming a mother two-and-a-half years ago, Krstic realized she wanted
to do something more with her heart and out of love. She got fed up with the
fashion industry. She wanted to start something by herself because she was
disliking how it was done. Krstic realized that with the combination of
experience and love, she might have found her formula to success.

This started her journey to get more in touch to herself. That’s why when you
ask her if she can describe her work and herself in a sentence, she will say:
“I am my work and my work is me’’.

But before starting to make her passion for art a profession, she started a
bathing suit brand called Augustine, with the motto “from the ocean, for the
ocean”. The bathing suits are made out of regenerated nylon obtained from
plastic waste and salvaged fishing nets.

Within the process of becoming a mother and starting her own company,
she had a lot of time to evolve and get closer to herself, and through this
process,  art was always by her side. She started making different kind of
drawings and started with her one-line portraits. Her pieces were always
divided in themes, and motherhood was one of the first.

Krstic is a perfectionist—this makes it hard for her sometimes to work, but it
also is thanks to this factor that her work is always so complete and in balance.
It’s her gift and her enemy.

No matter what she does, she knows what she wants and it has to be perfect.
She will never sell a piece she doesn’t fully stand behind. Sometimes she doesn’t
know how to deal with that, but that’s what brought her where she is.

We are thrilled she is bringing her latest exhibition to X BANK. As Krstic told us,
“X BANK is the perfect combination of fashion, lifestyle and art. With my
background in fashion and art and my boyfriend’s background in interior design,
it’s the perfect combination for Maja Krstic Art Diary.” Ensembles focuses on
people and the connection between them.
For the first time, Krstic uses color in her work, and for Ensembles, she focuses
on toned down colors, such as terracotta and monochrome. Every piece of paper
used in this collection is unique, made by hand in France, which was very difficult
to obtain.

Catch Maja Krstic at X BANK until January 2020