Julije Knifer was as one of the most prominent, influential and internationally acclaimed Croatian painters of the 20th Century. He was a cofounder of the avant-garde Gorgona Group, a renowned collective of Yugoslav artists and thinkers that worked from 1959 to 1966. His artistic practice concentrated on the exploration of a single form – the meander, which he started in the late 1950s and developed into a fundamental interest of his artistic production. A meander as a form can certainly be understood as a refined geometric form, but in the same breath it also speaks of the artist's exploration of absence and reduction, and of a meditative creative process that strives for perfection in execution. Julije Knifer exhibited at MOMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Haus der Kunst, Munich; National Gallery, Berlin; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Neue Galerie, Graz; Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; MACBA, Barcelona; MAMCO, Geneva; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Venice biennial; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb and many others. His work is as well featured in many private and public collections.

Julije Knifer is certainly one of the most prominent artists associated with concrete art after 1945. The repetition and the creation of series are certainly extremely important elements to consider in the context of his work, and this is probably most evident in the series of graphite drawings from 1979. This is the year in which Julije Knifer began to use a new technique of applying layers of pencil (graphite) to paper. Later, especially in the 1980s, he began to use the same technique to create more and more drawings, which can increasingly be understood as a kind of specific record of time. With extreme patience, Julije Knifer spent hours, days and months applying graphite to sheets of paper, creating a tension between the dark and light parts of the composition. By layering the graphite and applying it continuously, he attempted to cover the trace of the artist's gesture on the one hand, while on the other hand these same graphite two-dimensional surfaces, due to the dark light emanating from them, became a kind of object recording the infinity of time.