Julije Knifer: Fiac 2019

Julije Knifer is today largely recognised as one of the most prominent Croatian painters of the 20th Century. One of the founding members of the 1960s Croatian avant-garde group Gorgona, his oeuvre is centralised over the exploration of a single form – the meander, which started in the late 1950s and later developed into the single central point of his artistic production. The artist arrived at the meander whilst searching for the utter reduction of all expressive elements: «Within a few months I came, as it were, to the end, that is to a black and white painting (which I referred to as an anti-painting) – to a meander from which one simply cannot go any further». In art iconography, the winding meander of the river has been used since the earliest artistic production and is considered a synonym for the eternal flow of life; however, to Knifer the meander was a key to a world in which chronology had no meaning, and a way of creating works that were beyond their singular self, but part of a group of works that he continued to paint until the very last days of life. Gorgona group, which Knifer co-founded, was international both in its core activities and in its ethos.