JOSIP VANISTA | Telegrafske zice | 1959 | Indian ink on paper, signed, dated and dedicated to Boris Kelemen | 24.3 x 27.5 cm | CHF 6000.-

One of Vanista’s first drawings where the black line appears. Executed the year he founded Gorgona.

Gorgona was an informal art group with no common language, united by the common affinity to the spirit of modernism defined by the recognition of absurdity, emptiness, and monotony as aesthetic categories, inclination to nihilism, and metaphysical irony’ (in Julije Knifer, Uncompromising, exhibition catalogue, Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb, 2014, p.181).

“The line appears at the very beginning of my work, on the first drawings and paintings. It appeared in its most radical form between 1962 and 1964, as a silver line on a white background or a black line on a gray background.” (Excerpts form Josip Vanista: “The Endless Line”, MoMA)