Gorgona Group
also: Gorgona
The Gorgona Group was a Croatian avant-garde collective of artists and art historians who operated along the lines of anti-art in Zagreb between 1959 and 1966. Rather than a shared style, they shared an attitude: a questioning of what art is and how it circulates. Alongside individual works in traditional techniques, members proposed new forms of artistic communication - they ran a gallery and published Gorgona, a free 'anti-magazine' with no fixed format in which each issue was devoted to a single artist, from Julije Knifer to the Swiss radical Dieter Roth. The group's range ran from Knifer's hypnotic meanders and Ivan Kozaric's sculpture to conceptual gestures and jokes. Its works are now widely held in Croatian institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb and the Marinko Sudac Collection.
Defining characteristics
- Julije Knifer's meander: a single monochrome orthogonal motif repeated without variation or climax
- Reduced palettes dominated by black, white, and muted monochrome
- Minimal geometric repetition emptied of expressive gesture
- Art conceived as concept, communication, and event rather than crafted object
- Artists' publications with unconventional, anti-editorial layouts (the Gorgona anti-magazine)
- Photographic and printed documents treated as works in their own right
Key figures
- Josip Vanista (1924-2018) — Founding member and theorist of the group's anti-art program
- Julije Knifer (1924-2004) — Painted the endless meander, the group's most iconic image
- Ivan Kozaric (1921-2020) — Sculptor whose playful, protean work embodied the group's spirit
Example works
- Meander — Julije Knifer (c. 1960)
- Gorgona (anti-magazine) — Gorgona Group (c. 1961-1966)
Sources
- Gorgona Group - Wikipedia encyclopedia