Mangelos
Viši svet logički je nemoguć / a world on a higher level is logically impossible, 1977-1978
Tempera on cardboard
43,2 x 66,7 cm (17 x 26 1/4 in.)
Viši svet logički je nemoguć / a world on a higher level is logically impossible, 1977-1978 is a major work by Mangelos and was part of the 2017 Gorgona retrospective...
Viši svet logički je nemoguć / a world on a higher level is logically impossible, 1977-1978 is a major work by Mangelos and was part of the 2017 Gorgona retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Lichtenstein.
Visually recalling the esthetics of orthodox icon paintings, the Red lower case letters on painted gold paint compose the phrase "a world on a higher level is logically impossible ».
References to philosphy, philosophers and thinkers such as Hegel, Pythagoras (c.570–c. 495 BC) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) are common in Mangelos’s work.
This tempera on cardboard can be put in relation with a work from the same years, Hegel kritik der logik, 1977–8 (Tate collection) equally composed of red letters on a golden surface. Mangelos embraced Hegel’s idea that art in the modern age could not adequately express reality. This idea is central to Mangelos’s conceptual project. His principle of ‘no-art’ employed strategies of erasure, negation and denial. The globe’s title, Hegel kritik der logic (Hegel Critique of Logic) is a pun relating Hegel’s major opus Wissenschaft der Logik (The Science of Logic) back to its historic antecedent, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
For his personal art experiments, Dimitrije Bašičević took on the pseudonym Mangelos. Before assuming his artistic pseudonym, Bašičević studied History of Art and Philosophy in Vienna and Zagreb, and received a Ph.D. from Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy in 1957.
From 1959 to 1966 Mangelos was an active member of the Gorgona group in Zagreb.
Visually recalling the esthetics of orthodox icon paintings, the Red lower case letters on painted gold paint compose the phrase "a world on a higher level is logically impossible ».
References to philosphy, philosophers and thinkers such as Hegel, Pythagoras (c.570–c. 495 BC) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) are common in Mangelos’s work.
This tempera on cardboard can be put in relation with a work from the same years, Hegel kritik der logik, 1977–8 (Tate collection) equally composed of red letters on a golden surface. Mangelos embraced Hegel’s idea that art in the modern age could not adequately express reality. This idea is central to Mangelos’s conceptual project. His principle of ‘no-art’ employed strategies of erasure, negation and denial. The globe’s title, Hegel kritik der logic (Hegel Critique of Logic) is a pun relating Hegel’s major opus Wissenschaft der Logik (The Science of Logic) back to its historic antecedent, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason) by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).
For his personal art experiments, Dimitrije Bašičević took on the pseudonym Mangelos. Before assuming his artistic pseudonym, Bašičević studied History of Art and Philosophy in Vienna and Zagreb, and received a Ph.D. from Zagreb Faculty of Philosophy in 1957.
From 1959 to 1966 Mangelos was an active member of the Gorgona group in Zagreb.