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Between Painting and Sculpture – Radical Informalism in Croatia Art: Ivo Gattin and Eugen Feller

This presentation intends to give an insight into some aspects of the “radical Informel” of the late 1950s and early 1960s and its position in Croatian modern art with special emphasis on particular works by Gattin and Feller. In the early 1950s, political changes in the former Yugoslavia had an impact on Croatian art, especially after the expulsion from the Soviet bloc. Socialist realism became gradually less dominant, and abstraction more present in mainstream (official) art. Therefore, although Art Informel developed in Europe in the post- war period, it only appeared in Croatia and other cultural centers in Yugoslavia in the late 1950s. Some artists, such as Ivo Gattin and Eugen Feller, were more radical and embraced new approaches to materials and processes earlier than others. Gattin was considered the founder or pioneer of Croatian Informel, though his role was not fully appreciated at the time. Gattin and Feller’s works were considered experimental, and it was only two decades later that these two artists were widely recognized as important representatives of Art Informel in Croatia. Also, few other sculptors were experimenting with different materials and aggressive processes in their work, creating expressive surfaces and visualizations of destruction and decay as a result of war experiences and existential hopelessness in which they showed an inclination towards the dissolution of matter. In Croatian art, we cannot strictly separate or distinguish Informel sculpture as such, but we can see that the boundaries between painting and sculpture are sometimes loose. For example, Gattin’s Red Surface with Two Slashes (1962), or Feller’s Malampije (1961/62), are not sculptures in the sense of intentional modeling or spatial construction, but they are more like reliefs than paintings. Using nonconventional materials, then burning them and creating deformed shapes, they broke with the conventional rectangular format of the canvas, creating “anti- paintings”.

informal art ; painting ; sculpture ; Gattin ; Feller

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