Julije Knifer was one of the most 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 who worked together 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 can be understood as a refined geometric form, but it also speaks to the artist’s exploration of absence and reduction, and of a meditative creative process that strives for perfection in execution. Julije Knifer exhibited works at the Museum of Modern Art, 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 Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; and many others. His work is also featured in many private and public collections.

Julije Knifer is one of the most prominent artists associated with concrete art after 1945. Repetition and the creation of series are important elements to consider in his work. These elements are probably most evident in the series of graphite drawings Knifer made starting in 1979. This is the year in which the artist began the technique of applying layers of pencil (graphite) to paper. Later, especially in the 1980’s, 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 artis’'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 an object recording the infinity of time.