Edizioni Conz

Gorgona Group, Marijan Jevšovar, Untitled, 1990, Silkscreen on cloth, 155 × 133 cm, Edition of 20

Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin

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Silkscreen on cloth
155 × 133 cm
(61 × 52 ⅜ inches)
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Gorgona Group (1959–1966 Zagreb, Croatia [former Yugoslavia]) was a Croatian avant-garde collective of artists and art critics, taking their name from Greek mythology. The group operated as a forum, whose critical, anti-artistic, and radical ideas had their primary goal in the dematerialization of art. Gorgona was founded in Zagreb by the visual artists Marijan Jevšovar, Julije Knifer, Duro Seder, and Josip Vaništa, the sculptor Ivan Kožarić, the architect Miljenko Horvat, and the art historians Dimitrije Bašičević (Mangelos), Matko Meštrović, and Radoslav Putar. Taking Marcel Duchamp’s Dada as their starting point and aware of the activities of John Cage and Piero Manzoni, the members of Gorgona marked their trajectory between silent transgression, existentialism, and metaphysics through a process that embraced concretism and absurdity, the paradoxical and the immaterial. In the words of Vaništa, “Gorgona speaks of nothing. Undefined and undetermined.” Apart from presenting individual works, the collective had no strict agenda. Their practice mainly revolved around Studio G (also known as Salon Šira) for gatherings and installations, and occasionally curated exhibitions that stood out for their minimalistic presentation. The existence of Gorgona became known within the Zagreb art milieu through the publication of an eponymous “anti-magazine,” distributed free of charge and consisting of eleven uniquely conceptualized issues published between 1961 and 1966. The group’s activities remained barely known until a first retrospective was presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 1977. Their works were later included in the 1981 Bienal de São Paulo and the 1997 Biennale di Venezia. They have participated in group exhibitions at the Ludwig Foundation in Vienna (2000), The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2010).
Marijan Jevšovar (1922 Zagreb, Croatia [former Yugoslavia] – 1998 Zagreb, Croatia) was a Croatian painter whose works, characterized by a marked degradation of the painted surface, have been defined as anti-paintings. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Jevšovar spent two years in Paris, where he came close to the works of Jan Dubuffet, an artist who greatly influenced him. Co-founder of the Gorgona Group, his paintings are distinguished by negating traditional pictorial values. Using washed-out tones and colors, exhausting the canvas through multiple overlapping brushstrokes, Jevšovar emphasized the artistic process in the final work. His works have been exhibited at various venues, mainly in Croatia, France, and Germany. In 1995, he received the Zagreb City Prize for Artists.

Artworks (9)