GAME ART: STIPAN TADIĆ’S VIDEO GAME INSPIRED PAINTINGS

Tadić’s approach bridges the gap between painting and digital culture, translating the semiotics of video games into oil on canvas. His insistent use of HUDs (heads-up displays) and interface elements does not merely reference gaming nostalgia but interrogates the gamification of contemporary urban life, where financial instability, physical exhaustion, and mental depletion are quantified, managed, and optimized like RPG stats. This is particularly consistent with the status quo, as edgelords who hire vassals to performs in video games are running the country. His works critique the increasing abstraction of the self into a set of numbers, a trend exacerbated by gig economies, health tracking apps, and economic precarization. His paintings thus resonate with broader discourses on digital subjectivity, post-capitalist urban survival, and the ways in which game logic infiltrates real-world existence. They challenge the MFA-trained painter to consider the aesthetic and conceptual implications of game mechanics beyond their native medium, questioning how contemporary image-making navigates the entanglements of play, labor, and lived experience.

Here are a few examples:

Going in the City presents a nocturnal urban scene rendered in a hyperrealist, hypermediated style that recalls both classic history painting and the digital environments of early 3D games. A lone figure, holding an umbrella, descends into the subway as rain glistens on the pavement. The composition is bisected: on the left, the painting maintains a traditional perspectival depth, while on the right, a starkly flat, UI-like character inventory screen displays the protagonist’s clothing and possessions, minimal, functional, and suggestive of economic limitations. A pixelated HUD at the bottom provides an update on subway service, a subtle nod to how urban infrastructure dictates movement in a city. The interface elements turn a mundane commute into something like a mission objective in a dystopian game, where mere survival is framed as an achievement.

This piece, a homage to id Software’s Doom - strips the scene to its barest elements: an empty sidewalk lined with a monotonous brick wall, its perspective stretched into a tunnel-like effect. The muted color palette and sparse snowfall reinforce a sense of psychological isolation, while the bottom of the painting features a simulated video game UI. Stats such as Money, Mental, and Physical percentages evoke the resource-management mechanics of games like The Sims or Fallout, yet here they serve as a pointed commentary on exhaustion and economic fragility. The presence of bloodwork values in the interface further medicalizes the subject’s existence, reducing the body to a dataset: an allusion to the bureaucratic logic of both healthcare and survival-oriented game mechanics. Life in America is a deranged video game.

In this nocturnal scene, a hooded figure, cigarette in hand, stands against a brick wall under the eerie glow of streetlights. The dark, saturated palette recalls the cyberpunk aesthetic of Disco Elysium and Deus Ex, where urban alienation is coded through chiaroscuro lighting and a sense of perpetual transience. Above, a floating currency counter looms, a stark reminder of economic survival as a central game mechanic. A ghostly apparition emerges in a thought bubble - perhaps a hallucination, a memory, or an intrusive thought - reinforcing the work’s interest in how mental states are externalized in both painting and game interfaces.

Tadić's work is currently on display in the context of Algorithms of Longing...

a group exhibition at its Hong Kong gallery charting complex ideas, desires, and resonances in the Asian diaspora, situated in conversation with works that speak to post-Socialist and post-human longings. On view from January 14 to February 27, 2025, this focused presentation, organized by Pace’s Curatorial Director Xin Wang with support from the gallery’s President of Greater China Evelyn Lin, will bring together works by Amanda Ba, Ching Ho Cheng, Oscar yi Hou, Yifan Jiang, Lawrence Lek, Jarod Lew, Paulina Olowska, and Stipan Tadić. (read more)

...and in a second group show curated by Michelle Houston, Love letters to the City at the Museum for Urban Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany.

Stipan Tadić (b. 1986, Zagreb) is a visual artist based in New York City. He earned his MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2020 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2011. Since his first solo exhibition in 2009, he has presented his work in numerous solo and group shows. In 2014, he published his first comic book, Parisian Nightmares, and has since been an active contributor to independent comic zines. Tadić is also the co-organizer of Antisalon, a biennial exhibition founded in 2012. His accolades include the Best Young Artist Award from HDLU, Zagreb (2013), the First Prize at the International Comic Book Festival in Łódź, Poland, and several other national and international awards.

Stipan Tadić

Algorithms of Longing

Love letters to the City