24. Installation [1973.]

If the names of styles are at all important for placing someone's creativity in the context of time, the opus of Miroslav Šutej (born in 1936 in Duga Resa and died in 2005 in Krapinske Toplice) could comfortably be placed between two movements that had a great impact in the arts of the 1960s and 1970s – pop art and op art. In his work, pop art elements can be found in intense colors and often unrestrained eroticism, while op art elements are found in the insistence on dense textures and graphic virtuosity of his works. This drawing is part of Šutej's cycle of mobile works. In addition to a series of such drawings, the artist also printed mobile serigraphs. These are works whose segments are connected by joints that allow them to move and, thereby, create different compositions. Such works could be interpreted by Umberto Eco's phrase "open work" (from the eponymous book published in 1962). An open work is an artistic creation that engages controlled chaos as the basis of its aesthetics. It does not have a fixed semantic, interpretive, or perceptual center. It is a work of fluid composition, just like this mobile drawing, whose tubular segments can be moved at will. Šutej's mobile drawing presupposes interactivity, rearrangement of its parts, and play with potential compositions, and suggests the possibility of countless different relationships between its parts. The intense colors of the movable components of this work and the regular textures of the ink lines that animate them, invite the recipient to participate in the art act that can never be completed. On the occasion of the exhibition of Šutej's mobile drawings at the Meneghini Gallery in Mestre, in 1974, Vera Horvat Pintarić noted how such experimental approaches to drawing can have different cognitive implications for their interactive viewer: "For someone, such a playing visual field can provide quite amusement in discovering randomly occurring changes that condition and different state of images. For someone else, such a work will be an opportunity to expand their own perceptual capabilities; to sharpen the ability to notice what can all be the consequence of change." FG

Dimensions

width 90 cm, height 95 cm

Description

mobile collage, ink and color on cardboard, signed and dated on the back, in pencil, "Miroslav Šutej 1973"

Research information

The work was exhibited at the Miroslav Šutej solo exhibition, May 1974, Galleria Meneghini, Mestre and it's the first reproduction in the exhibition catalog. The work is signed, dated and marked on the back.

Dating

1973.

PROVENANCE

last 50 years in a private collection, Venice.

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