Šime Perić
Movement, 1969
oil on canvas, 120 × 135 cm
MG-4502

Šime Perić (1920–2019) was a figurative-abstract fantasist and a classic of Croatian painting. In the 1950s, his oeuvre विकसित from impressionistic, coloristic figuration toward abstraction grounded in action painting and Tachism. Following the dark, painterly Informel phase of the 1960s, the 1970s saw him create works of refined yet intense chromatic expression. By abandoning the rectangular format of the canvas, he occasionally produced paintings in the form of a tondo, invoking through the circular form the archetypal image of the island. From the 1980s onward, he also worked successfully in sculpture.
A semester spent in Paris in 1949 was crucial for his artistic development and intellectual expansion. He studied fresco painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He graduated from the Academy of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 1952 and was an associate of the Master Workshop of Krsto Hegedušić until 1957. At the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, he was a professor from 1969 to 1984.
The stain and its transformation into chromatic centrifugal and centripetal movements constitute one of the foundations of Perić’s oeuvre. Movement (1969) is both a chronological and morphological marker of abstract colorism. It is articulated through the gradation of clusters and the formation of a distinctive colored translucency. The work stands at the intersection of physical materiality and a chromatic symphony that absorbs and radiates in all directions, forming a kind of colored amalgam—an amorphous yet shaped core of everything. This color symphony is marked by pronounced elegance and delicacy, with a dispersed, glowing, and in parts absorbing expression achieved against a black ground.
Šime Perić received the “Vladimir Nazor” Lifetime Achievement Award in 1989. In 2003, a monograph on Perić by T. Maroević and M. Šolman was published. In 2007, based on Perić’s designs, the 12th section of the “White Road” was realized in Dubova Park near Labin.

Text: Željko Marciuš, Museum Advisor at the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb