Julije Knifer
From the early 1960s to 2004, Croatian painter Julije Knifer repeated throughout his life the same pattern, the meander. Between 1959 and 1960 he defined the basic elements of his works by reducing his pictorial means almost exclusively to black and white and to vertical and horizontal, in the form of the meander. The first Meanders occur as an expression of extreme reduction, aspiring to create anti-paintings and the aura of contemplation. For Knifer the meander is not a decoration or aesthetics, for him it is a sequence of acts that make a meander or a series of meanders which, in the end, make just one meander. Although he extremely reduced its visual language, in this limited framework, he showed a remarkable ingenuity succeeding to never repeat the identical form. He said it best himself: “The meander is a form of my freedom.”
He represented Yugoslavia in 1976 and Croatia in 2001 at the Venice Biennale. A full retrospective of his work was organized in 2014 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. He has participated in major exhibitions all over the world including solo exhibitions at MAMCO in Geneva, FRAC & Atheneum at Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, …
From the early 1960s to 2004, Croatian painter Julije Knifer repeated throughout his life the same pattern, the meander. Between 1959 and 1960 he defined the basic elements of his works by reducing his pictorial means almost exclusively to black and white and to vertical and horizontal, in the form of the meander. The first Meanders occur as an expression of extreme reduction, aspiring to create anti-paintings and the aura of contemplation. For Knifer the meander is not a decoration or aesthetics, for him it is a sequence of acts that make a meander or a series of meanders which, in the end, make just one meander. Although he extremely reduced its visual language, in this limited framework, he showed a remarkable ingenuity succeeding to never repeat the identical form. He said it best himself: “The meander is a form of my freedom.”
He represented Yugoslavia in 1976 and Croatia in 2001 at the Venice Biennale. A full retrospective of his work was organized in 2014 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb. He has participated in major exhibitions all over the world including solo exhibitions at MAMCO in Geneva, FRAC & Atheneum at Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, Museum of Slavonia in Osijek, and group exhibitions at Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
Courtesy of Galerie Frank Elbaz
