91. Krk Landscape (Voz Bay) [cca. 1950.]

Oton Gliha is a famous Croatian painter who has elevated the dry stone walls and piles of the island of Krk not only to the hallmark of his work, but also to the synonym of great painting on the Croatian and global scale, as confirmed by the not-small presence of his Piles in first-class world and Croatian museums, such as the National Museum of Modern Croatian Art in Zagreb and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York. He painted the Landscape with Voz Bay during the early 50s of the last century and it already anticipates the life preoccupation of his work. More specifically, he painted this cove of Krk with the old name Vošćica - which for centuries served for hauling boats from the sub-Velebit sea to the island - from a sample high point, so the depiction of the landscape of Krk is topographically convincing and artistically fresh and attractive. He painted it at a time when he no longer wanted or needed to bother with socialist realist poetics and when he was looking for new stimuli for his painting. He found them precisely on Krk while carefully researching the landscape features of the native island of the painter Mile Kumbatović, his wife and colleague from Tartagline and Babić's painting class at the Zagreb Academy, from 1950. By 1952, on the island of Krk, the painter's open studio, magnificent paintings of Dobrinj, Omišalj and Bodulis were created that were significant for the unrestrained evolution of Gliha's life cycle of "Piles". To them should be added the Krk landscape exhibited here, in which the Voz Bay, its northern cape and Velebit in the distance are joined into a rational and emotional image of the author's love and humility towards their beauty and rough ground that he embraced and which personifies him. From the mid-50s, Gliha's painting increasingly frees itself from the landscape of Krk, the sea, vegetation and the Velebit horizon to be only the ground, dry stone walls and finally abstract piles that determined his artistic individuality. BRP

Dimensions

width 80 cm, height 60 cm

Description

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

Research information

The piece was exhibited at the ''III. Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture of the Union of Fine Artists of Yugoslavia'' in 1954 and publicized in the accompanying catalogue: MARKO ČELEBONOVIĆ, ''III Exhibition of Painting and Sculpture of the Union of Fine Artists of Yugoslavia'', exhibition catalogue at the Art Gallery Dubrovnik, July 1, 1954. - August 1, 1954., Jastrebac Printing Company, Belgrade, 1954., pg. unpaginated, cat. No. 35 (under the name ''Krčki landscape (Carriage)''. The work was also published and reproduced in the review of the exhibition in: ed. LALOSLAV HORVAT, ''Bulletin of the Department of Fine Arts of the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts. Croatia: Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts'', vol. 5 and 6., Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1954., pg. 33 (under the name ''Krčki landscape (Carriage I)''

Lot.notes

enter stickers from the back

Dating

cca. 1950.

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