Vladimir Kristl
(1921 or 1923-2004)
A Variation, 1958
oil on canvas, 59.4×72.8 cm
MG-2579

Vladimir Kristl (1921 or 1923-2004) was a painter, animator, film director and screenwriter, draughtsman, cartoonist, poet, professor and lecturer. In short, a polyhistor and a polymath who was active in the period from Post-Socialist and High Modernity to Postmodernism. In the field of the visual arts, his work includes paintings and drawings, caricatures and graphic designs, animated, experimental and feature films. According to art historian Igor Zidić, Kristl was an intriguing and great artist of provocation who gained cult status. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1949, and was one of the co-founding members and painters of the EXAT 51 group of painters and architects (1951-1956) and exhibited at the group’s first public exhibition of abstract painting (together with artists Ivan Picelj, Božidar Rašica and Aleksandar Srnec) held at the Croatian Architects Association in 1953. During the early 1950s he was one of the pioneers of Abstract Art in Croatia and the most orthodox in the pursuit of geometric abstraction. In the late 1950s, he neared the concept of the materiality of painting as it was advocated by Art Informel. In 1959 he started painting a black and white series of positives and negatives, in which paintings became monochrome screens and which were painted in only achromatic white, for example. Kristl’s A Variation painting from 1958 is divided into three ascetic achromatic sections and features, according to art historian Ješa Denegri, a deliberate uncertainty of execution. The painting’s irregular grid pattern heralds his Variants and Variables series from the early 1960s, in which he uses cheap (non)painting materials (e.g., wire, thread, paper, wood). He authored two anthological films of the Zagreb School of Animation: The Piece of Shagreen Leather (1960) and Don Quixote (1961), whose characters are reduced to ideograms and in which he experimented with animation. Because of social pressure and because he felt misunderstood by the other members of the Zagreb School of Animation, he moved to what was then West Germany, where he became a leading figure of key events in German cinematography.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum advisor of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Ana Janković
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb