Tag: Composition III

Julije Knifer, Composition III, 1960

Julije Knifer
Composition III, 1960
oil on canvas
66.5 x 97 cm
MG-2577

The meander is the predominant motif in the oeuvre of Julije Knifer (1924 – 2004), one of Croatia’s most important 20th century painters. Knifer’s reductive abstraction is characterised by a selection of one single motif and his systematic treatment of it. Firmly fixed by the painting frame and painted in equally important black and white surfaces, the meander had been Knifer’s only theme since 1959. He adopted the term meander ideated by I. Zidić. Knifer’s entire oeuvre is defined by the consistency of repetition of the rhythm of the meander and the continuity of space and time. Pronounced absurdity, paradox and irony brought Knifer closer to the ideas of the Gorgona Group, of which he was a founding member (1959). In 1961 he participated in the first exhibition of the New Tendencies. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1956 (Đ. Tiljak) and completed his postgraduate studies under the mentorship of A. Mejzdić. His strict and repetitive non-psychological Self-portraits (1949-1952) and drawings of Stenjevec (1952) – behind the motif of which the structure of the meander is observable – are the prototypes of his anti-painting, which is what he calls the meander in the 1960s in his diary-like Records. Composition III (1960) is not yet titled Meandar, but its visuality and free association imply it. We see the sublimation of the motif as the ultimate absolute of flat white and the ultimate linear absolute of black; like the positive and negative of motif marking of equal value. In Knifer’s system of uniform, monotonous rhythm, we recognise influences ranging from the philosophy of Existentialism and Absurdism, to Malevich and Cézanne (Z. Maković). One of Knifer’s favourite Renaissance artists – which is no coincidence – was Piero della Francesca. By having increased the dimensions of the meander, he also designed ambient installations (Tübingen, 1975). Since the 1970s, he lived and exhibited in Germany and France, and in 2002 he received the “Vladimir Nazor” Lifetime Achievement Award. He was also a passionate football fan.

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

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

Šime Perić, Composition III, 1961

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

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