Edizioni Conz

Gorgona Group, Mangelos, Untitled (cut, red), 1978, 1990, Silkscreen on cloth, 155 × 133 cm, Edition of 50

Courtesy of Archivio Conz, Berlin

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Since Mangelos and Radoslav Putar objected to the issue, their contributions were signed and authenticated by the other five members of the 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).
Dimitrije Bašičević, also known as Mangelos, was a pivotal Yugoslavian art historian among the founders of the Gorgona Group. He studied art history and philosophy in Vienna and Zagreb, later working as a curator and art critic. In 1971, Mangelos became Chairman of the Center for Film Photography and Television, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. He organized numerous exhibitions in Croatia and abroad, contributing to conceptual and constructive art growth in eastern Europe. His artworks, often composed of letters, symbols, and numbers, were usually exhibited anonymously within the Gorgona Group. He took part in the organization of New Tendencies exhibitions and joined the Group of Six Artists in 1975. Mangelos’s works have been presented in numerous international galleries and museums, including the Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel and the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2004). Other significant group exhibitions were held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin (2008), the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2010), and The Museum of Modern Art in New York (2011).

Artworks (9)