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 that worked from 1959 to 1966. From the beginning of his art activity, his primary materials were notebooks, slates and globes; ready-mades which he transformed and reinterpreted by inscribing on them 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 relation between image and text. The work of Mangelos has been presented in various notable international exhibitions at MOMA, 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. What is maybe most significant in the context of Mangelos’s work is the simplicity of the message, which together with the cruelty of the medium, creates an ambivalent impression of deep truth expressed almost in an intangible form. Although his works are visually attractive in the harmony of red, black and white, with geometric letters and the words that he wrote between the drawn lines on blackboards, books and globes, his work shouldn’t be understood in the context of refining form and reductionism in art, but rather in relation to the negation of painting. Embracing a formal language that may seem surprising or difficult in its conceptual thought or idiosyncratic reference, 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 very important basis for his whole oeuvre.