(Osijek 1924–2004 Paris)
Untitled (IV), 1969, signed and dated 1969 on the reverse, acrylic on canvas, 30.2 x 40.2 cm, framed

We are grateful to Galerija Gregor Podnar and Galerie Frank Elbaz for their kind assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance:
Galleria Sincron, Brescia, acquired directly from the artist (stamp on the reverse)
European Private Collection (inherited by the director of Galleria Sincron, Brescia)

Julije Knifer is today largely recognised as one of the most prominent Croatian painters of the 20th Century. One of the founding members of the 1960s Croatian avant-garde group Gorgona, his oeuvre is centralised over the exploration of a single form – the meander - which started in the late 1950s and later developed into the single central point of his artistic production.

Early on in his career, Knifer experimented with meditative conceptual forms, playing with geometric patterns which led to the slow emergence of “the meander”, a geometric maze-like form composed of only horizontal and vertical lines, almost exclusively in black and white. Meander, apart from the obvious association with a river and its continuous flow, had a conceptually important element of time. In Knifer‘s words, “I realized that I didn‘t want to create a single painting, a work that would be self-contained and complete in and of itself. I understood that my drawings and my own images were only one in a series of connected similar acts.”
From 1960 onwards, Knifer exclusively painted the meander motif. Inspired by the notion of serialism in music (experienced at the 1961 Music Biennale in Zagreb), and in particular the repetition and reduction in the music of Schonberg and Stravinsky, Knifer transported their idea of music as rhythm into his painting, reducing his works to pure and simple (geometric) forms playing with narrow-wide, horizontal-vertical, and black and white or gold.

Gorgona group, which Knifer co-founded, was international both in its core activities and in its ethos. Archives of the group reveal regular exchanges between Croatian artists associated with the group and their international contemporaries, including Lucio Fontana, Robert Rauschenberg and Piero Manzoni. Furthermore, François Morellet, Piero Dorazio and Victor Vasarely exhibited with Gorgona in the first exhibition of the New Tendencies movement in Zagreb in 1961, which in turn was closely linked to the activities of the Azimuth group in Italy, the Nul in the Netherlands and ZERO in Germany.

Knifer articulated the meander conceptually in his early sketches before he formally started painting the motif, and his life-long dedication to this simple form - the study of absence, the reduction and complete perfection in execution - reveals an artist who found his meditative outlet in the process of painting. Much like On Kawara in his Date Paintings, Knifer used a singular theme in his work to record the timeless existence and repetition of the purest, simplest form, creating calmness and beauty that exudes from these works. Some of the most interesting explorations with the forms are the rare meander forms in gold which are still widely collected today.

Knifer represented Croatia in the 2001 Venice Biennale, and in 2014 the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb mounted a full retrospective of his work. He has exhibited at Centre Pompidou, Paris, MAMCO in Geneva and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and his works are in numerous private and public collections around the world, including the MoMA in New York and the National Gallery in Berlin.