Dimitrije Bašičević Mangelos was an influential artist, curator and art critic who was associated with the avant-garde Gorgona Group, a renowned collective of Yugoslav artists and thinkers who worked together from 1959 to 1966. From the beginning of his art activity, his primary materials were notebooks, slates, globes, and ready-mades, which he transformed and reinterpreted by inscribing them with letters, words, sentences, Cyrillic or Glagolitic characters and sometimes longer texts in Latin. His approach was deeply grounded in philosophy and aimed to investigate the prospect of painting after the experience of wartime and devastation. The result of his investigation was a unique form of anti-art that established a direct relationship between image and text. The work of Mangelos has been presented in various notable international exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Serralves Museum, Porto; Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo; Venice Biennale; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Carré d’Art Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes; HKW, Berlin; and many others. His works are found today in eminent public and private collections.

Mangelos’s work can be defined by the simplicity of the message, which together with the harshness of the media he uses creates an ambivalent impression of deep truth expressed in an inaccessible form. Although his works are visually attractive in the harmony of red, black, white, and inscribed letter forms, his work should not be understood as reductionist, but rather as a negation of painting. Embracing a formal language that may seem surprising or difficult, Mangelos commented - often directly - on the state of the world around him, emphasising his place within it or simply affirming the existence of an external reality full of conflict, politics and life. Humour and irony were also present in the way he presented his thoughts. He often criticised authorities, combined different foreign languages, letters, and fonts, while creating a gap between a pretentious message and a witty sentence. Aware that such writing was not a reflection of the precision of functional thinking, he composed many manifestos in short and clear forms that stood as a basis for his whole oeuvre.