Lot 52, Josip Vaništa - Composition No. 2 - A Different Perspective. The Post-War era in Central and Eastern European Art. </br> 2 December 2021, 7 p.m. GMT+2 - Auctions

Composition No. 2

Description

Executed in: 1959

Medium: oil on canvas

Size: 69.5 x 91.5 cm

Signed and dated on the reverse

Provenance

Private collection, Ljubljana. Acquired by the present owner from a private collection in Zagreb.

Location

Ljubljana

Price realised €73,200

Estimate €50,000 - €70,000

Description

The influential artist, writer, and teacher Josip Vaništa was a cofounder of the avantgarde Gorgona Group, a renowned collective of Yugoslav artists and thinkers that worked from 1959 to 1966. Beside individual works linked to traditional techniques, the members proposed different concepts and forms of artistic communication, ran a gallery and published the anti-magazine Gorgona. As a painter, Vaništa is mostly known for his idiosyncratic drawings, always on the verge of radical minimalism and also conceptual paintings of a single grey or silver line on a white or black canvas. Vaništa has exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Venice biennial; MOMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; National Gallery, Berlin; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana and many others. His work also features in many private and public collections. Vaništa’s particular approach to painting leads towards the reduction of tone, colour and form in its pure essence, almost to the point where painting or drawing exists on the edge of material presence. The element of the line appears at the very beginning of his 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 grey background. Metaphor in Vaništa’s work is evident and it can be read as the impossibility of persistence and the discontinuity of communication, influences on effective communication that influence its interpretation. The line is a symbol and a metaphor of striving for infinity, which can be applied not only to the human spirit and a desire for the continuity of its humanist efforts, but also to the idea of eternity.

Exhibitions

Reproduced in the publication Rubne posebnosti: Avangardna umjetnost u regiji (Marginal peculiarities: Avant-garde art in the region) published by Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka 2007.

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More art from

Josip Vaništa

Lot 28

White Line

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Price realised €61,000

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