CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2006 - IVAN PICELJ (1924)

IVAN PICELJ (1924) Ivan Picelj (Okučani, July 28, 1924), after a period of six decades of activity on the Croatian and foreign visual arts stage emanates an aura of a hardened modernist in the era of the post-modern art as one of the greatest fighters for the dignity and inventiveness of the geometric abstraction in this part of the European area. The artist, who has an intimate knowledge of the most hidden and subtle strategies of artistic diversions of the modernism, has all these years built into each of the next, new series of his works a coherent and meaningful theoretical-philosophical-poet-like dimension, removing any argument of the most bitter opponents of abstract geometry, who consider that in this segment of artistic practice it goes only for the intelligently conceived play of geometric solids and structures. Picelj enrolled his study course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1943, but in the course of the year 1945 he interrupted his studies due to the ideological difference of opinion with a part of the teaching team owing to their standpoint relating to the importance of the abstract art and their forcing of social realism as the pervading style. An important phase in his artistic formation was the arranging of the Yugoslav exhibitions at home and abroad (Zagreb, Vienna, Hanover, Stockholm, Turin and Chicago). He was one of the founders of a group of painters and architects EXAT 51 (Experimental atelier, 1951) in Zagreb and he also counter-signed the manifestoes from the years 1951 and 1953 in which the group argued for abstract art. EXAT 51 at the same time stood for the synthesis of all disciplines of visual art creations, the spreading of the space of artistic freedom and a radical break with the practice of social realism and traditional functions of visual art. EXAT’s first exhibition was opened in 1952 in Picelj’s apartment in Zagreb which has served as his working place up to the present. The exhibitions of this group of artists between 1951 and 1953 in Paris, Zagreb and Belgrade were the first exhibitions of abstract art in public premises in the Yugoslavia of that time and in the rest of the socialist block. By the painting, graphic and graphic-typographic segment of his designer opus Picelj carried over to the younger generations of Croatian artists the postulates of neo-constructivism, aesthetics of the Bauhaus, the minimalism and conceptual studies, but also, together with Almir Mavignier and Božo Beck, he was one of the founders of the movement New tendencies – a range of international exhibitions of abstract art in the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary Art (1961 – 1973). In 1959 he exhibited in the Paris gallery Denise René together with Aleksandar Srnec and Vojin Bakić and it was since that time that his long-term cooperation with this gallery had started. He has exhibited and still continues to do so at numerous exhibitions of constructivist and kinetic art all over the world. For a long time he was a collaborator and designer of the Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art, the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery and the designer of books and monographs. The work Composition Tyma 3 belongs to the early period of Picelj’s investigation into abstraction, where each work contains its own inner logic and regularity of the arrangement of forms in a set format, with special emphasis on the so called dynamic balance of the picture’s composition. The tone register in this period of Picelj’s creation (1952 – 1960) was often saturated and darkened, with almost no primary colours, and the colour scale ranges from saturated nuances of brown, violet, blue and green colour to balancing the picture with black and white abstract irregular surfaces. Želimir Koščević points out that by this rational analysis of the tone register of primary colours and by reducing forms to geometric elements, Picelj has developed “a specific, impersonal direction of geometric abstraction within the contemporary Croatian painting”. The colours and forms on the picture speak for themselves, and it depends on the observer that as the only aesthetic experience he should read into them exclusively their interrelationship in the fine balance of drawn forms and tone nuances. Nowadays we recognize this rather hermetic phase of Picelj’s as the artist’s characteristic and specific contribution to Malevich’s poetics relating to the absence of cause in art, but also the systematic reduction of everything that is “painting”, everything that is not immanent for the very essence of abstract aesthetics.