78. Blue Landscape

Đuro Seder was born in Zagreb in 1927, where he also died in 2022. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He then went on to teach at the Academy from 1981 and earned the title of Professor Emeritus. He was a member of HAZU. Seder's artistic activity from the late 1950s was associated with the Gorgona group. He painted radical abstraction - black paintings of thick, material accumulations. His manifesto Impossibility of the Picture, published in 1971, encapsulates all the nihilism of the post-war epoch that is manifested in existentialism in literature, philosophy, and informel in visual arts. It represents an expression of ultimate distrust in the humanistic and metaphysical potentials of art. However, already by 1981, in contrast, he writes the Possibility of a Picture, a manifesto of a return to painting setups of open color, figuration, expression, affirmation of meaning through artistic creation. Since the 1980s, his canvases have followed this poetics: the colors are intense, the application is impasto. He paints motifs of stylized figuration from everyday life or episodes from the Bible, and often also portraits and self-portraits, to which he approaches with a touch of humor. This Seder landscape belongs to the coloristic phase of his work. The motif from nature is painted with undeniable vitality, evident in all visual elements. The lush vegetation on a sunny day is captured through rich material, color intensity, and vigorous strokes with which the author shapes the scene. The painting is permeated by the impression of a moment captured from the fullness of reality, which is contributed to by the coloristic accents of intense yellow, the overall openness of the palette and the decisive gesture with which the scene is painted. It is a very successful example of Seder's cheerful expressionist poetics. (F.G.)

Dimensions

width 80 cm, height 70 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed bottom right, in blue, "SEDER"

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