oil on hardboard, 35 x 45 cm, signed top right, engraved, "IVANČIĆ Lj"

Ljubo Ivančić was born in Split in 1925 and died in Zagreb in 2003. He completed the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1949. After the Second World War, he was one of the most prominent representatives of existentialist poetics in Croatian painting - poetics that borrowed some morphological elements from enformel and from broken, stylized figuration then popular in France. He also worked as a professor at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, and from 1961 to 1979 he ran the Master's Workshop (a form of postgraduate study) at the same institution. Characteristics of his achievements, visible in this painting, are strong contrasts and impasto applications of paint. The fish represented here radiate from the dark in which they are found with their intense yellow, even golden color. So, the painting is divided into two zones - the upper, dark and the lower, illuminated by yellow tones. In the very middle of the painting, between these zones, are two fish, two dead animals, caught or netted for human consumption. They are both coloristically and thematically the center of this painting, which as a whole acts as a poetic meditation on Mediterranean life. FG

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