Edizioni Conz

Gorgona Group, Julije Knifer, Untitled (cut), 1990, Silkscreen on cloth, 155 × 133 cm, Edition of 20

Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin

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This editions is a motif of Julije Knifer, member of Gorgona Group.

Silkscreen on cloth
155 × 133 cm
(61 × 52 ⅜ inches)
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Taking their name from Greek mythology, the Gorgona Group was a Croatian avant-garde collective of artists and art critics. 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. 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 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).
Julije Knifer was a prominent abstract painter related to Neo-Constructivism. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, graduating in 1956. His artistic production, developed within the Gorgona Group, was characterized by the reduction of all expressive elements through the exploration of a single monochromatic form, the meander, an endless reiterative geometry. In addition to the activities with the Gorgona Group, he was among the first artists to be presented in the series of exhibitions titled New Tendencies in Zagreb. Knifer represented Croatia at two editions of the Biennale di Venezia (1979 and 2001). His works have been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MAMCO – Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Geneva, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. In 2014, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb honored him with a major retrospective. His works are in included in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate in London, and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

Artworks (9)