The influential artist, writer, and teacher Josip Vaništa was a cofounder of the avantgarde Gorgona Group, a renowned collective of Yugoslav artists and thinkers who worked together from 1959 to 1966. Beside individual works in 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. He is also known for his conceptual paintings, consisting of a single grey or silver line on a white or black canvas. Vaništa’s work has been exhibited at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; MAMCO, Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Venice Biennale; The Museum of Modern Art, 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 approach to painting is the reduction of tone, colour, and form to their pure essences, almost to the point where painting or drawing exists on the edge of material presence. The element of the line features prominently even from his earliest 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 Vaništa’s work can be interpreted as referring to the impossibility of persistence, the discontinuity of communication, and the challenge of communicating in such a way as to be understood. 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.