Edizioni Conz

Gorgona Group, Đuro Seder, Untitled (uncut), 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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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).
Đuro Seder was a Croatian painter. He studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb and began his career as an illustrator. During the 1960s, in parallel with his activity in the Gorgona Group, his painting was characterized by a reduced use of colors and gestural brushstrokes inspired by Abstract Expressionism and Informel. In the early 1970s, Seder distanced himself from minimalist stylistic precepts and returned to using vibrant colors outlining expressive figurative forms. A painter but also a writer and a poet, he wrote for several Croatian magazines, publishing collections of poems and short stories. He taught at the Academy of Fine Arts of Zagreb from 1981 onwards. He was honored with the Vladimir Nazor Award for Painting (1986). Among many notable exhibitions, highlights include those at the Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome (1979) and the National Museum of Contemporary History in Ljubljana (1994). A substantial retrospective was presented at the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb in 2015.

Artworks (9)