Mangelos

An active member of the Gorgona group in Zagreb from 1959 to 1966, Dimitrije Bašičević  was a conceptual artist devoted to the idea of “anti-art” and a desire to move beyond painting. For his personal art experiments, the artist took on the pseudonym Mangelos, a name was taken from the name of a village near his birthplace, Šid. He worked as a curator and a critic, and in the 1950s became one of the foremost champions of Yugoslav naïve art. His first art works, Paysage de la mort 1942–4 (Landscape of Death) and Paysage de la guerre 1942–4 (Landscape of War), were paintings in which found printed images were entirely covered in black paint. From that point onwards, he began to create works in various media including notebooks, books, tablets, sheets, and globes. The works were often made in series, and included Pythagoras, which featured geometric shapes, Négation de la peinture, in which printed reproductions were painted over, and Abecede, which featured Glagolitic and Latin letters and runes. In addition to Croatian, his native language, Mangelos often used French and German and Glagolitic script (the oldest known Slavic alphabet) and runes in his works, indicating his interest in sign-systems and the relationship between word and image. On his theory of “no-art,” Mangelos commented that his aim was “to negate the picture by writing it with words, to negate the word by painting it.”

Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at institutions such as Centre Georges-Pompidou, Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Serralves in Porto,  Kunsthalle Fridericianum in Kassel, Fundacio Antoni Tapies in Barcelona, and Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Bremen Museum of Modern Art in Weserburg, MACBA in Barcelona, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz, and Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes, among many other venues worldwide.

Courtesy of Tate