A painter, writer, and professor of drawing in Zagreb, Vaništa has been a legendary figure in the Yugoslav art scene for nearly seventy years. While he made his most significant contributions to the international art scene in his role as a founding member of Gorgona, an experimental and conceptual artists' group active from 1959 to 1966, he also maintained a painting practice that included traditional still lifes and landscapes, as well as conceptual paintings of a single grey or silver line on a white or black canvas. The three works on display here act as an index of or commentary on his painting. They perform the same gesturea single line horizontally crossing a planein an overpainted photograph, in a collage, and, maybe most radically, in La Description (1964), a sheet of A4 paper with this typewritten text: "A silver line on a white background, height 3 cm, length 180 cm, canvas size 140 x 180 cm."

Gallery label from

Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016.

Medium Typewriting on paper
Dimensions 11 1/2 x 8 1/4" (29.2 x 21 cm)
Credit Gift of the artist
Object number 35.2013
Department Drawings and Prints

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