Đuro Seder
Self-Portrait with a Self-Portrait, 2007
oil on canvas
160 x 130 cm
MG-7493
Đuro Seder (1927-2022) is a multifaceted, universal painter. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (A. Mezdjić, 1951; attended M. Tartaglia’s special course, 1953). He worked as an illustrator and graphic designer, and in the mid-1950s he painted dynamized paintings in the spirit of Tachisme. As a founding member of the Gorgona art group (1959-1966) that brought together artists who shared a spiritual kinship, he advocated a Neo-Avant-Garde spirit, freedom of art and thought, which heralded the New Art Practice that came later. Seder’s oeuvre displays a unique progression from the mute, dark impossibility of painting (Seder’s essay, 1971) in the form of non-iconic Art Informel (Composition, 1961) to black and dark green expressive figuration from the late 1970s that gradually announced the possibilities of painting (Seder’s essay, 1981) and New Image painting (1981), of which he is one of the pioneers. Seder’s Art Informel emanates a logical fact: painting is a non-descriptive composition that refers to nothing outside its materiality. It is devoid of any reference to reality, other than the processes of painting.
Eventually, in the 1990s, Seder developed a distinctive Neo-Expressionism of total painting, as well as a series of ironic and self-ironic self-portraits featuring a healthy dose of humour and, on occasion, joy in the vein of the New Wild (since 2007), and new spiritual-religious paintings.
It is precisely the humorous, playful and (self)ironic note aimed at his own being that Seder reflects in the Self-Portrait with a Self-Portrait (2007), in which he duplicates his figure by doubling the self-portraits using the principle of the mirror image.
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