19. Boulders [1987.]

The horizontal composition by Oton Gliha (1914 - 1999) represents a motive that he successfully varied throughout his life, stone heaps, namely dry walls. Here, they have the characteristics of Pollock-style, all-over painting, so a composition without a clear center, a section from a landscape that turns into abstraction with dense strokes. Gliha is fascinating in that he managed to express a motif from a landscape so that it constantly balances between the recognizability of a raised view of the grid of dry walls and pure abstraction, in other words, an expression through elements of the visual form that creates a pronounced rhythm and gives the impression of movement, trembling in his paintings. All this here is achieved in a narrowed color range, combining strokes of black, white and gray, with just a hint of yellow tones. Such mastering of a painting's space shows how Gliha, thanks to his painting skills, could create diverse and rich compositions that are teeming with life out of a single, somewhat monotonous, motif. Gliha's stone heaps are a demonstration of the enduring power of painting in the post-war modernist period when traditional painting setups (about color, rhythm, composition) were put in the service of a new, abstract (abstracting if you want) visual expression, which is not entirely separate from reality and its experience. FG

Dimensions

width 140 cm, height 57 cm

Description

oil on canvas, signed lower right, in black, "GLIHA"

Dating

1987.

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