Marino Tartaglia, Triptych (Self-Portraits), I-III, 1964

Marino Tartaglia
(1894 – 1984)
Triptych (Self-Portraits), I-III, 1964
oil on wood and canvas
107 x 200 cm
MG-2433

Marino Tartaglia (1894 – 1984) is a universal painter of historical and high Modern art. His painting is a synthesis of different influences and styles, ranging from El Greco and Tintoretto, Primitivism, Cézannism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Neoclassicism, Colourism, and Lyrical and Reductive Abstraction. Tartaglia’s references are often illegible, and his painting is based on the rationalisation of painting procedures. With them, he reconciles the laws of plastic order and the emotional approach to painting (T. Maroević). Tartaglian sfumato is correlated with E. Vidović. In the Marginalia, he reconciles the contradictions with the postulate: “The painting must reconcile all contradictions; and be a timeless archaeological find in its own time.”
In 1912, he began his studies in Florence (Giacometti) and then continued his education at the Instituto Superiore di Belle Arti in Rome; he was friends with the representatives of Futurism gathered around the magazine Lacerba. He was the only foreigner to have exhibited his work at the 1918 Exhibition of Independent Artists in Rome, together with the prominent Italian Avant-Gardists (C. Carà, G. De Chirico, E. Prampolini, A. Soffici). After the end of World War I (1918 – 1921), he lived in Split, Vienna, Belgrade and France. In 1947 he became a full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and in 1948 a full member of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts.
Triptych (Self-Portraits) I-III evoke the glowing self-portrait from 1917, then the one with the pipe (1921), while the third evokes the laurels of the third epoch. He was the recipient of the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award (1964), and retrospective exhibitions of his work were staged at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb in 1975 and at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery in 2003-2004.

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

Đuro Seder, Traffic Lights, 1964

Đuro Seder
Traffic Lights, 1964
oil on canvas
101 x 60 cm
MG-2638

Đuro Seder’s painting Traffic Lights from 1964 is a paradigmatic example of the nocturnal side of painting. In his early phase, the artist was so preoccupied with the absurd that the only thing he saw in reality was nothingness, powerful blackness and deep silence. The critics would directly connect Đuro Seder’s black paintings with the views of the Gorgona Group, but the artist himself interprets them as a continuation of his personal, totally spontaneous and completely honest artistic explorations. The titular motif of the traffic light is just an excuse for the artist to build an artistically pure and masterfully executed composition in which only a few white spots, in the midst of a gloomy darkness, bring hope for something new and better.

Đuro Seder (Zagreb, 1927 - 2022) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1951 (mentored by Antun Mejzdić), where he also attended Marino Tartaglia’s advanced course and later worked as a professor from 1981 to 1998. He started his career working as an illustrator and graphic designer, and from the mid-1950s he created dynamic paintings in the spirit of Tachisme. As one of the founders of the Gorgona Art Group (1959 – 1966), he advocated the neo-avant-garde spirit, freedom of art and thought. Seder’s Art Informel-esque non-figurative paintings were initially dark, monochrome, and since 1976 he has been filling them with expressionist gestures and accentuated colourism. In the 1980s, he was one of the pioneers of the New Image painting in Croatian art. After the distinctive neo-expressionist total paintings with thick layers of paint from the 1990s, he later often painted self-portraits in the vein of the New Wild (since 2007) and religious themes. As a highly complex artistic personality, Seder also published poetry.

Text: Lada Bošnjak Velagić, museum advisor 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

Ante Orlić, Amazon Woman, 1964

Ante Orlić
(1933 – 2004)
Amazon Woman, 1964
bronze
167 x 43 x 59 cm
MG-8145

In 1958, Ante Orlić obtained a degree in sculpture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, in the class of Frano Kršinić, and then continued his training in Vanja Radauš’s Master Workshop (1960 - 1964). In 1961, he became a member of the Croatian Fine Artists’ Association, and has worked as a freelance artist throughout his entire career. He has been staging solo exhibitions since 1966 and has participated in a number of group exhibitions at home and abroad.
He prefers to work in bronze as a dominant sculptural material. He creates portraits of intimist and representational character, in his own distinct style featuring voluminous abstract forms with realistic accents, which is also visible in his medal-making oeuvre. Religious works exhibiting a refined traditional lexicon make up a large part of Orlić’s sculptural work. In works in public spaces, however, he often reaches for geometric stylisation while respecting urban planning. His gestural drawing and painting oeuvre accompanies his sculptural challenges.
Orlić was preoccupied with the motif of the stylised female figures, executed as spatial constructions in unrevealed poses and gestures of physical and spiritual relaxation. The figure of the Amazon Woman is standing on a rectangular base with rounded corners, her legs are spread with feet facing forward and the upper part of the body is turned to the left. Her physiognomy is rendered with the basic accents of the eyes, nose and lips, while the ellipse of the head is accentuated by the hair pulled back to the nape of the neck. The torso is composed of just the left severed upper arm and a right protruding breast. An elongated deformed standing nude with rudimentary attributions suggestively depicts the mutilated stoic female warrior, both vulnerable and strong at the same time.

Text: Tatijana Gareljić, 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

Oton Gliha, Gromače (Dry-Stone Walls) 10-64, 1964

Oton Gliha
Gromače (Dry-Stone Walls) 10-64, 1964
oil on canvas
130 x 130 cm
MG-3934

Otona Gliha (1914 – 1999) is a doyen of Croatian gestural abstraction veering towards the pictorial matter of Art Informel. He is a painter of ideograms, a painter of land and a painter of culture (I. Zidić). The artist’s primordial principles of painting are epitomised by the never fully elaborated synchronicity between Old Church Slavonic Glagolitic script engraved in stone and the typical, adopted coastal dry-stone walls – the so-called gromače (pl.). Since prehistoric and ancient times, cattlemen and farmers have built these walls to delimit space and to mark the boundaries of arable land, as well as pasture areas. Gliha gradually elaborated and abstracted the motifs within the painting and developed his own style. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1937 (Lj. Babić, O. Mujadžić, M. Tartaglia). Under the influence of Cézanne and Fauvism, in the mid-1940s, he created landscapes featuring a newfound colour harmony and vividness. In 1954, he began to summarise the motif that transformed the abstract visual elements of the first Gromače. Gliha’s painting Gromače 10-64 (1964) displays an intense material colouristic relationship with the primordial motif. We see a screen of quivering magma rendered by the furrowing, absorption and glowing of the achromatic and, to a lesser extent, coloured segments of the composition, which are woven into the white structural fabric thus creating contrasts and overlaps between the line and the surface, as well as their density, like a formative pictorial positive and negative. Gliha described the motif of dry-stone walls as urban-architectural-sculptural beauty. He has also created a prolific drawing and a more modest printmaking oeuvre, wall paintings, stone mosaics, as well as the ceremonial curtain of the Croatian National Theatre (Barske gromače, 1981) in Rijeka. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the “Vladimir Nazor” Lifetime Achievement Award (1976).

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb, 2023

Josip Vaništa, Composition III, 1964

Josip Vaništa
(1924-2018)
Composition III, 1964
oil on canvas
100×130 cm
MG-2575

Josip Vaništa (1924-2018) was, according to art historian and critic Igor Zidić, a universal artistic figure and paradigm of Croatian culture. In his Book of Entries (2001), Vaništa wrote the following: “I searched for the right to mistakes, to contradictions, to metamorphoses”. In terms of the poetics of the absurd, his drawings are also non-drawings of sorts, his paintings non-paintings and his activity in the Gorgona Group non-activity. Having been a founding member of the Gorgona Group of Croatian Neo-Avant-Garde artists and art historians (1959-1965) – a socially isolated phenomenon which brought together individuals who shared a spiritual affinity – Vaništa advocated a neo-avant-garde spirit, freedom of art and mind, which heralded the contents of the later New Art Practice movement. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1950 under Prof. Marino Tartaglia, and taught at the Faculty of Architecture between 1951 and 1994. What mattered to him in his drawings was not only the outline of his figures, but also the whiteness from which his motifs were birthed. Following in the footsteps of the tradition of Modernism (Josip Račić, Milan Steiner), he created an oeuvre of single-motif meditative paintings in which whiteness is a metaphor for coloured light. In 1961 he started reducing his motifs and themes to a series of monochrome paintings. Featuring a tonal duality, his Composition III painting from 1964 is a great example of his minimalism. The surface of the painting is cut across by a horizontal flat line, of which Vaništa said that it was “the only residue of content, of theme in painting without illusionism”. Vaništa’s minimalist method heralded future tendencies in art, while his awareness of the conceptuality of painting replaced factuality with verbality, ultimately replacing the process of painting with a precise description of the same process. After the 1970s, he returned to the poetics of Realism with his watercolours, which are his most important works from this period. He also did illustration, book layout, produced theatre stage sets and authored several books. He became a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in 1994 and won the 2006 Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award given yearly by Croatia’s Ministry of Culture.

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

Nives Kavurić Kurtović, Painting 2, 1964

Nives Kavurić Kurtović
(1938 – 2016)
Painting 2, 1964
mixed media
75 x 37 cm
MG-5993

Nives Kavurić Kurtović is one of the most significant Croatian painters. In 1957 she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she obtained a degree in graphic art and painting in 1962 in the class of prof. Frano Baće. From 1962 to 1967, she was an associate in Krsto Hegedušić’s Master’s Workshop. She had her first solo exhibition in 1963, and twenty years later she became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. In 1997 she became a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts and thus the first female academic in Croatia. The beginnings of her work as a painter were marked by the so-called black phase under the influence of Existentialism and Art Informel. Thick layers of oil paint accompany the decaying anthropomorphic forms in drawing. The fusion of drawing as “the most human of possibilities” (N. Kavurić Kurtović) and the painterly will be present throughout her entire oeuvre based on intimate expressions, translated into surreal elements such as fragmented body parts, deformations of form, materiality of colour fields and lines, as well as the incorporated textual segments, thus creating scenes full of potent personal symbolism.
Like the mechanisms of the unconscious, Painting 2 connects various techniques of interventions on canvas (mixed media), and it combines segments that the mind finds “incompatible”, with Dadaist organic connection. An attempt at order using black and white tessellated text counterpoints the abhorrent human, child’s “body” broken by surfaces and strokes of colour. The text is arbitrary, so as a sign of communication with symbolic energy it is in opposition with its usual purpose of conveying the message. The painting is also a struggle of strong colouristic symbolism: a dialectical unity of red and black. With their colouristic domination, the red lines that we read vertically – the upper ones with sharp corners, the lower ones that are round – frame the fragments into an intimate-surreal whole and, at the same time, provide tectonics to the entire display. Their liveliness in the lower third part of the scene is calmed by the horizontal of the only unbroken black line.

Text: Željko Marciuš, museum consultant of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: from the National Museum of Modern Art's archives © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb

Oton Gliha, Dry-Stone Walls, 1964

Oton Gliha
Dry-Stone Walls, 1964
felt-tip pen/paper

“It all started one day in 1954, when the landscape on the island of Krk, furrowed by dry-stone walls, suddenly appeared to me as some old tablet with letters carved in Glagolitic script. This association may seem strange, even ridiculous, but for me in that moment, it was fatal and it helped me unravel all the excitement I had carried within me for years as I observed this strange geometry, architecture and sculpture that man inadvertently created in his struggle with the stone. Freeing the miserly soil from the stone, he then captured it again with that same stone, enclosing it with dry-stone walls. This is how those rectangles, squares and circles were created, this fantastic rhythmic vortex of lines and surfaces.”, this is how Oton Gliha described his paintings in 1958.

Gliha was born in 1914 in Črnomelj, Slovenia. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb from 1933 to 1937, and in 1938 he received a one-year scholarship to study in Paris. After World War II, he travelled around Bosnia and Herzegovina and then Italy in 1952; the paintings he created in that period still show no signs of the cycle that he will gain recognition with and that Gliha, once he conceived it, will paint for the rest of his life. His first solo exhibition in Zagreb in 1954, however, offers some indication that landscape painting will soon lead him into pure abstraction. The drawing we showcase here is an example of one of the early uses of felt-tip pen in Croatian art. Of the felt-tip pen as a tool, Gliha says: “During years spent studying dry-stone wall complexes on the island of Krk, I used only the felt-tip pen. I felt it allowed me to fix multitude of points of different shapes and sizes, as some symbols of stones deposited in those dry-stone walls. At the same time, the point started to build directions and surfaces and to live its own independent life.”
In 1976, Gliha was the recipient of the “Vladimir Nazor” Lifetime Achievement Award, and he died in Zagreb in 1999.

Text: Klaudio Štefančić, curator 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

Miljenko Stančić, Waiting Room, 1964

Miljenko Stančić
Waiting Room, 1964
oil on canvas
97 x 116.5 cm
MG-2630

Miljenko Stančić (1926 – 1977) was the pioneer and the most prominent painter of post-war Surrealism and Fantastic Art in Croatia that is based on tradition, precise tone modulation and the legacy of old masters (G. de La Tour, J. Vermeer from Delft, P. de Hoh), as well as the painter of Josip Račić’s pure perception. With his exceptional skill and by having synthesised the old and the new, Stančić created a unique style in the manner of the so-called museum, anachronistic painting. His oeuvre between the early 1950s and the late 1970s is composed of personal metamorphoses (vedute of Varaždin, fantastical transformations of human figures in poetic interiors, erotic contents) and subdued gammas illuminated by “animated lighting and an increasingly virtuoso and melancholic palette” (M. Krleža). He obtained a degree in painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1949, and in graphic arts from T. Krizman’s advanced graphic arts school in 1951. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts between 1960 and 1977. In the period from 1954 to 1957, Stančić realized the so-called third phase of his oeuvre, in which the subject matter of his drawings and paintings was mostly Varaždin. During this phase he painted A Street in Varaždin (1955). The painting “Waiting Room” (1964) depicts a surreal, uncouth, crumpled mass of alienated figures rendered in dark colours on a grey foundation inside an abstract ambience, which moves in static dynamism through the space of alienation defined by a non-descript backdrop. Stančić was a member of the Group of Five, and from the 1960s onwards he also participated at the exhibitions of the Belgian group of artists Fantasmagie.

Text: Željko Marciuš, Museum Advisor of the National Museum of Modern Art © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb 2022
Translated by: Robertina Tomić
Photo: Goran Vranić © National Museum of Modern Art, Zagreb 2022

Skip to content