oil on canvas, 85 x 120 cm, signed lower right, in black, "SEDER"

Đuro Seder, with his creative lifetime and the diversity of his painting opus, encompassed a significant period and poetic range of post-war Croatian painting. Born in Zagreb in 1927, he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts there, at the Marin Tartaglia, and then taught at the same Academy, painting precisely in Tartaglia's studio. Even after his official retirement, he remained at the Academy as a professor emeritus and died in 2022, also in Zagreb. He was a member of the neo-avant-garde group Gorgona, and in the spirit of the art of the sixties, painted black paintings canceling all content: both figural and formal, which he accompanied with an essay or manifesto The Impossibility of Picture, published in 1971. After that, he had a poetic turn and by the end of the 1970s, he explored the possibilities of intense color, expressive stroke, and impasto application of color. All of which is also followed by a manifesto The Possibility of Picture, published in 1981. This painting belongs to the latter, vitalistic-expressive part of Seder's opus. On it, we see the famous Zagreb building, the Mestrovic Pavilion, summed up in a few energetic strokes and practically squeezed in color against the surrounding lush vegetation. The vision of a single building on a sunny day completely captivated the painter, who here managed to convey an intense sense of beauty and enthusiasm for life, the feeling that this scene aroused in him. This painting is valuable also because it reminds us of the neat park around the Mestrovic Pavilion, its lively urbanism and harmonious vegetation, which are unfortunately destroyed today. FG

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