Šime Perić
Composition III, 1961
oil on hardboard, 170 x 122 cm
MG-4305

Šime Perić (1920 – 2019) was a figurative-abstract fantasist and a classic of Croatian painting. During the 1950s, his oeuvre developed from the impressionist colourist figuration to a gestural and Tachisme-based abstraction. After his tenebrous Art Informel period during the 1960s, in the 1970s he produced paintings with a refined and intensely colouristic expression. Abandoning quadrangular form of the canvas, the paintings are sometimes executed in the form of tondos, whose circular form evokes the archetypal image of an island. In the 1980s he began sculpting as well, and successfully so. In 1949, he spent a semester studying fresco painting in Paris at the École des beaux-arts, which expanded his horizons intellectually and was of crucial importance for Perić’s painting. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 1952 and worked as an associate at painter Krsto Hegedušić’s master workshop until 1957. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb between 1969 and 1984.
The motif of dots and their transformation into colouristic centrifugal and centripetal motion is one of the bedrocks of Perić’s oeuvre. Composition III from 1961 defines Art Informel in Croatia both chronologically and morphologically. The painting is executed by grading clusters of formless, magma-like matter. It lies at the intersection of factuality, physical materiality of painting and feelings of restlessness and existential angst it expresses.
Šime Perić was the recipient of the “Vladimir Nazor” Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989, and in 2003 Perić’s monograph by T. Maroević and M. Šolman was published. In 2007, the 12th section of the “White Road” in the Dubrova Sculpture Park near Labin was realized according to Perić’s designs.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant at the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb