CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2005 - MIROSLAV ŠUTEJ, DRAWING, 1962, INDIAN INK ON PAPER

MIROSLAV ŠUTEJ (Duga Resa, April 29th, 1936 – Krapinske Toplice, May 13th, 2005) All his life Miroslav Šutej managed to elude strict stylistic determinations, and his opus is regularly connected with categories of imagination, creativity, ludic behaviour, humour, ideological untamableness, because he joined, in a rarely specific way, the heritage of the geometrical abstraction with optical effects (op-art) and kinetic art. There is almost no artistic medium, genre, material or technique where he left no recognizable ideal trace. Šutej studied graphic art with Marijan Detoni at the Zagreb Academy of Visual Arts, and between 1964 and 1965 he was an assistant in the Masters’ workshop led by Krsto Hegedušić, and between 1964 and 1965 he was in Paris to enhance his education. However, starting in 1962 – 1964 he already began creating the so called optic drawings (for instance the well-known “Bombardment of the eye nerve”, 1962) where he studied the visual limits and models of perception of the human eye, analogous to the phenomena of that time that psychology of perception dealt with in Europe and America. Emphasized optic black-and-white phenomena that appear in the series of Šutej’s drawings and graphics go beyond the narrow determination of op-art: the artist creates his own world of “optic fantasy” and “strategy of visual shock” (Zvonko Maković). Writing about Šutej’s one-man exhibition in 1962, Igor Zidić says that he “turned the ready-made features of the geometric into fantasy”, and accurately points to the surrealistic starting points of Šutej’s specific world. Since that time to date, Šutej’s work was proof of a rare level of florid imagination and of the awareness that it was unnecessary to perform radical cuts between figuration and abstraction in order to be a contemporary and genuine artist. What particularly characterizes Šutej’s works from the early sixties is the absence of colour. Countless variations all boil down to black-and-white drawings in three-dimensional forms where the artist plays with haptical and mobile effects, i.e., with spatial illusionism: the forms seem to move on the surface and come closer to the observer. In a few years’ time, this drawing research would lead Šutej to the first sculptures and objects, but also to mobile graphics and drawings where mobile, dynamic elements of constructions are added to the static surface. The actuality of Šutej’s drawings and objects was also recognized rather early in European frameworks so that, along with the participation at the New Tendencies exhibitions in the course of the sixties and seventies, he was also invited to appear at the great critical and thematic exhibitions of optic and kinetic art all over Europe. Šutej’s three-dimensional object with movable extensions and segments are also of particular significance (like the identical principles that he applied later, in 1969, in the area of graphics), in this way rescinding the thesis that the artist entirely defines and completes his work. Thus the observer becomes “the artist’s co-player and partner” (Z.Maković) and this leaves the work eternally open and unfinished. Šutej started another important segment in the democratization of art in 1965 by printing great series of serigraphs, which made the work of art accessible to a larger number of art lovers, in this way leaving the oasis of modernist intangible/untouchable exclusivity. Šutej introduced a grain of cheerfulness even into serious, representative tasks; in 1993 he designed the denominations for the Croatian Kuna banknotes, and he is the author of the current version of the Croatian coat of arms. He held some two hundred individual exhibitions in Croatia and abroad, received numerous domestic and foreign prizes/awards, and his works can be found in the collections of the greatest and most important world museums and galleries. He was professor at the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb and regular member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. Iva Körbler