Presentation

In 1959, the year he founded Gorgona with his friends and colleagues, Josip Vaništa staged a solo exhibition in Zagreb of his drawings from the 1950s.

A black-and-white photograph commemorates the occasion; it shows three framed works on the wall, studied by three female visitors. The drawing on the left suggests the moody, delicate, somewhat abstract graphite drawings that the artist produced at the time—a near-abstract landscape reduced to little more than a horizon line, while the work on the right remains concealed by one of the attentive onlookers. The main focus of the women’s studied attention is the drawing in the center of the photograph, and yet we no longer can make out the details of the original work.

For in 1965, six years after the picture was taken, the artist made an important change to the photographic print: he covered the central drawing on the wall with a thin layer of white paint and bisected it horizontally with a ruler-drawn black line. Formally not impossibly far from the abstracted landscapes of his other drawings from the 1950s, this new, fully abstract composition is nonetheless clearly a distinct alteration, a hand-painted addition to and conceptual leap from the photographically documented drawings of the 1950s. Instead of trying to suggest a trompe-l’oeil replacement of one work by another, the addition to the photo is clearly an intervention.

It performs a different operation, one more important to the understanding of Vaništa’s development at this crucial moment, by linking visually and conceptually two distinct bodies of work and marking the leap his work took in the years between the original photograph and the edited version.

Vaništa himself remarks on this moment: “The line appears at the very beginning of my work, on the first drawings and paintings. It appeared in its most radical form between 1962 and 1964, as a silver line on a white background or a black line on a gray background. It was shown at an exhibition reduced to only the typed description, ‘A silver line on a white background, height 3 cm, length 180 cm, canvas size 140 x 180 cm,’ dematerialized and developed into a concept. This was in about 1964.”

During the six years that had passed between the time Vaništa’s drawing exhibition was staged and the picture was taken, and the overpainting (coincidentally, the work’s title is Übermalung [Overpainting]) was added in 1965, several important conceptual maneuvers that are fortunately represented in MoMA’s collection had taken place: Vaništa and his cohort had founded the Gorgona group and had begun to publish and distribute the first eight issues of its magazine (also titled Gorgona); Vaništa’s colleague Julije Knifer had begun to make works dedicated to a single, repeating form—the meander, an S-shaped white form on black ground or black form on white ground—which he would continue to explore until the end of his life; and Vaništa had begun a series of works that all share a similarly simple, overriding compositional principle—a single horizontal line that bisects a monochrome background in the center of a rectangular landscape format.

The intervention into the earlier photograph suggests—even insists—that Vaništa’s conceptual horizontal lines have their beginnings in the more conventional graphite landscapes of the mid-1950s, a point the artist also makes in a later comment: “Landscape, flatland, and geometrical plane, and finally line—the horizontal line. What was left out of a drawing was more important than what was put into it. It led to simplicity, to reduction, to emptiness. And then to silence.”
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Who is the artist?

In 1959, the year he founded Gorgona with his friends and colleagues, Josip Vaništa staged a solo exhibition in Zagreb of his drawings from the 1950s. A black-and-white photograph commemorates the occasion; it shows three framed works on the wall, studied by three female visitors. The drawing on the left suggests the moody, delicate, somewhat abstract graphite drawings that the artist produced at the time—a near-abstract landscape reduced to little more than a horizon line, while the work on the right remains concealed by one of the attentive onlookers. The main focus of the women’s studied attention is the drawing in the center of the photograph, and yet we no longer can make out the details of the original work. For in 1965, six years after the picture was taken, the artist made an important change to the photographic print: he covered the central drawing on the wall with a thin layer of white paint and bisected it horizontally with a ruler-drawn black line. Formally not impossibly far from the abstracted landscapes of his other drawings from the 1950s, this new, fully abstract composition is nonetheless clearly a distinct alteration, a hand-painted addition to and conceptual leap from the photographically documented drawings of the 1950s. Instead of trying to suggest a trompe-l’oeil replacement of one work by another, the addition to the photo is clearly an intervention. It performs a different operation, one more important to the understanding of Vaništa’s development at this crucial moment, by linking visually and conceptually two distinct bodies of work and marking the leap his work took in the years between the original photograph and the edited version. Vaništa himself remarks on this moment: “The line appears at the very beginning of my work, on the first drawings and paintings. It appeared in its most radical form between 1962 and 1964, as a silver line on a white background or a black line on a gray background. It was shown at an exhibition reduced to only the typed description, ‘A silver line on a white background, height 3 cm, length 180 cm, canvas size 140 x 180 cm,’ dematerialized and developed into a concept. This was in about 1964.”During the six years that had passed between the time Vaništa’s drawing exhibition was staged and the picture was taken, and the overpainting (coincidentally, the work’s title is Übermalung [Overpainting]) was added in 1965, several important conceptual maneuvers that are fortunately represented in MoMA’s collection had taken place: Vaništa and his cohort had founded the Gorgona group and had begun to publish and distribute the first eight issues of its magazine (also titled Gorgona); Vaništa’s colleague Julije Knifer had begun to make works dedicated to a single, repeating form—the meander, an S-shaped white form on black ground or black form on white ground—which he would continue to explore until the end of his life; and Vaništa had begun a series of works that all share a similarly simple, overriding compositional principle—a single horizontal line that bisects a monochrome background in the center of a rectangular landscape format. The intervention into the earlier photograph suggests—even insists—that Vaništa’s conceptual horizontal lines have their beginnings in the more conventional graphite landscapes of the mid-1950s, a point the artist also makes in a later comment: “Landscape, flatland, and geometrical plane, and finally line—the horizontal line. What was left out of a drawing was more important than what was put into it. It led to simplicity, to reduction, to emptiness. And then to silence.”

When was Josip Vanista born?

The year of birth of the artist is: 1924