CROATIAN MODERN PAINTING 2005 - JULIJE KNIFER, MEANDAR, 1978, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS

JULIJE KNIFER (Osijek, April 23rd, 1924 – Paris, December 7th, 2004) The artist whose art has become a synonym for the meander motif, which Knifer varied between 1959 and 1960 in thousands of distinctive variants, mostly black-and-white meanders, is one of the most interesting Croatian artists from the second half of the 20th century. In the 50s he adopted the tradition of cubism and purism, having developed sensitivity for this trend through his professor at the Zagreb Academy of Visual Arts, Đuro Tiljak, who had studied in Moscow with Kandinski and transmitted to his students the abstract painting heritage of Kandinski and Maljevič. Knifer’s series of self-portraits that he used to paint on a daily basis between the years 1949 and 1952 in hundreds of variations were actually an indication of the relativization of categories of the essential, the time and the artistic motif, and a logical pre-phase of the meander motif. Knifer was a co-founder of the Gorgona Group (1959), and his notes on his own painting and thoughts on art are much more than a ‘testimony of time’ – but a deep relationship between the (painted) poetic of the meander and the experienced existentialist philosophy, with extremes between the absurd, negation and complete spiritual and existential fulfilment. It is in these extremes that the key to the meaning of the meander is hidden. “There are two extremely contrastive minimums – the black and the white, but at the same time complete maximums... The mediator from the white to the black is the meander.” (Julije Knifer, 1976). Knifer arrived at this strictly minimalist, reduced, rhythmically repetitive and geometrized meander with the intention of creating an anti-picture, which is a complete evanescence of the picture, which he later exchanged for the thesis about evolution and continuity of his own painting development. At the time of the emergence of Knifer’s meander, while there were discussions going on in the Croatian and European art about abstraction and figuration, the late Informel (action painting) was still prevailing. In 1961, Knifer’s painting was instantly recognized within the European framework, which means not only within the Zagreb exhibition New Tendencies. Ješa Denegri pointed out in 1969 that the inclusion of Knifer’s meanders in important critical European exhibitions of abstract art (starting from 1963 up to the present days) was a clear sign it was “immediately recognized that it was a new type of geometricization that was not following the post-Mondrian reduction ... but comprised the disintegration of any formal nucleus in the Informel and started from tabula rasa, from a line of eternally repetitive rhythm or monochromic surface, with the aim of arriving at a clearly determined and stable dimension of the spiritual meaning of the painting”. Since 1973 Knifer mostly painted in Tübingen, owing to the invitation of the collector Dacić, and until 1990 he would stay there every year for a few months on working visits, creating meanders in formats permanently expanding. Nowadays, the majority of these works can be found in German, Swiss and French private art collections and national museums and galleries. Starting in 1976, together with some other artists, he exhibited in the Yugoslav pavilion at the 37th Biennale in Venice, and in 2001 he represented Croatia at the 49th Biennale in Venice, the selection being made by Zvonko Maković, an excellent interpreter of Knifer’s opus. In the nineties, Knifer’s fame was growing proportionally to the timelessness of his meanders: for instance, in 1992 his works were included in two important thematic exhibitions at the Paris Centre Georges Pompidou. However, the meander has not remained captured in two flat dimensions: in Germany, Switzerland, France and Zagreb, Knifer painted several large ambiances and murals in exhibition premises, on the walls of buildings and in interiors. Though he visited Paris for the first time long ago, in 1957, Knifer often stayed and exhibited in Paris which became his permanent home in 1994, but he made regular summer visits to Zagreb and Gorski Kotar. In 2001 Knifer was proclaimed honorary citizen of Osijek.