Ivo Šebalj
My Memento of a Barbaric Act in Knin Church, 1997
oil on canvas
153 x 210 cm
MG-8394

Ivo Šebalj (1912-2002) was a modest individual, yet a classic of hermetic, meditative Lyrical Abstraction which is always correlated with a figural motif. Šebalj’s painting of existentialist intimism occupies the interspace between the concrete and the abstract, between the chromatic and the achromatic, between drawing and painting, where even in his most abstract works he painted figurative motifs however difficult they may be to recognise (Z. Rus). Through a relatively few themes (the smoker, the painter and his model, (self)portraits, female nudes, rooms, his experience of war, sacral motifs), Šebalj’s oeuvre always sustains a feeling of his personal insignificance in respect of the art of painting. Having taken a few gap years, between 1934 and 1942 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Lj. Babić and O. Mujadžić, and graduated under M. Tartaglia. He worked as a clerk, and it was only in 1954 that he started working in his profession – as a teacher at the School of Applied Arts and Design, and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1961 to 1978. Šebalj’s oeuvre can be divided into several stages: after a period of anonymity, he started exhibiting as late as 1970 at the age of 58. The 1970s were the decade when he was discovered as an artist, the 1980s when he became famous, and the 1990s when he became universally acclaimed. The posthumous evaluation of his oeuvre is the final stage. Šebalj’s body of work transcends both local and national boundaries, and is his personal and impenetrable valorisation and revaluation of modernist painting (P. Picasso, F. Bacon, J. Dubuffet). He stated: while Picasso narrowed the world to a motif, what I tried to do was to expand motifs (according to art historian I. Zidić). Šebalj’s drawing is distinctive and his colour palette ranges from dark and dense to completely pure. Šebalj’s painting My Memento of a Barbaric Act in Knin Church from 1997 is his eternal remembrance, mediated by D. Fabijanić’s photograph, of acts of barbarism in Knin since the beginning of the Homeland War, when everything that could be destroyed and devastated was destroyed – including the looted and desecrated Franciscan Church of St. Anthony. The visualisation (a monumental diptych) of the barbaric act is painted in a typical Šebalj manner and conveys the harrowing experience and acts of cruelty perpetrated by the aggressor, as well as the expressive humanism for the universal suffering, of people, the city and heritage. It is a motif that is hard to fathom – a memento. The painting becomes a pierced target, a reflection of symbolic destruction rendered in achromatic and chromatic warm and cool yellow-green syncopated contrasts. In addition, the whiteness and blackness on a thick abstract foundation express personal – the possessive determiner my from the painting title – burden, despair, horror, but also not forgetting.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of 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