CROATIAN FINE ARTS, Edo Murtić

Edo Murtić, Good Day Red, 1980, oil on canvas Edo Murtić (Pisanica 1921 - Zagreb, 2005) is a Croatian painter who, with his variation of abstract expressionist painting, was one of the founders of abstract painting in the region and achieved an exceptional artistic career on the international scene. His works have been included in the collections of leading national and world museums. In the 1950s, at the invitation of the organizers he successfully took part in the Venice Biennale and the documenta in Kassel, two of the most important international art events today. Several monographs have been published and several documentaries made on the work of Edo Murtić. His legacy is cared for by the Murtić Foundation, founded by the artist's family. In 2021, in cooperation with the Croatian Society of Fine Artists, the Foundation marked the centenary of the artist's birth with the exhibition Murtić 100. The exhibition was a critical success and was seen by twenty thousand visitors in a mere month and a half. Edo Murtić is considered the most important artist of the latter half of the twentieth century in Croatia and the region. After studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Ljubo Babić and completing a painting course with Petar Dobrović in Belgrade, he was recognized early on as an outstanding artist. His compositions, in the wake of poetic realism, stood out with their muted colors and a distinct sense of the material of visual arts. Murtić joined the partisans in 1943, and together with Zlatko Prica in 1944 he founded a lithographic printing house in Topusko. He illustrated the poem by I.G. Kovačić, The Pit. After the war, he decided to pursue an independent artistic career, and after his stay in the United States from 1951 to 1952, he created the Experience of America cycle, which announced his abstract expressionist phase with his expressive range of colors and strokes and introduced the local audience to the abstract art of high modernism. Murtić would soon develop his recognizable style of vitalistic gestures and an open color palette that, like a painting brand, would mark all of the subsequent phases and stages of his career. Murtić's personal charisma and uncompromising advocacy of democratic social values made him an artist with whom the public identified not only abstract art, but also the entire era of high modernism. In 1968, together with a group of artists, he founded the Forum Gallery in Zagreb, which has remained one of the most important and beautiful city exhibition spaces to this day. In addition to his masterful oeuvre as a painter, Murtić also left an indelible mark on all other art disciplines such as drawing, graphics, enamel, mosaics, sculpture and monumental compositions in public spaces. His oeuvre is estimated to include 7,000 works of art. Branko Franceschi, Art Historian