Acrylic on plastic and metal globe
Dimitrije Bašičević, who created work under the pseudonym Mangelos, aimed “to write a painting or paint literature.” An art historian, art critic, curator, and poet, he challenged the traditional understanding of media and art by painting letters and words in Latin, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic (an ancient Slavic alphabet) on notebooks, book pages, school blackboards, and globes. Mangelos referred to these works as “no-art,” which he was inspired to begin making following the Second World War.
2025
Gallery label from Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980 , September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016.
Bašičević was an art historian, writer, curator, and proponent of outsider art in Croatia. He also produced drawings, notebooks, paintings, and over-painted globes under the pseudonym Mangelos (after a small town near his birthplace), which he kept private until his first exhibition in 1968. As a founding member of the artists' group Gorgona, Mangelos had an interest in creating "anti-art." In his work he interrogated accepted systems of thought, including language, mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion, often incorporating the tools of the young student. He covered notebooks, book pages, school blackboards, and globes with monochrome paint and letters and words in Latin, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic (an ancient Slavic alphabet) to, as he put it, write a painting or paint literature.
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Invitation: Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb
Gallery 406Situated between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc, the socialist country of Yugoslavia (1945–91) was notably open to international influence and enjoyed broad cultural freedom.
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