10 September – 9 November 2024
Opening Reception: Tuesday, 10 September, 6–8 pm
Peter Freeman, Inc. is pleased to present Julije Knifer’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, taking place in the 100th year of the anniversary of his birth and 20 years since his passing.
“Chronology and order are irrelevant in my work. I have probably already created my last paintings, but maybe not yet the first ones.” Julije Knifer, Notes (1977)
Widely considered one of the most important and influential Croatian painters of the 20th century, Julije Knifer helped found the neo-avant-garde Gorgona group, an influential Zagreb-based collective active from 1959 to 1966 whose main ambition was the search for artistic and intellectual freedom. He dedicated the majority of his artistic career, from 1959 until his death in 2004, to the exploration of a geometric and rhythmic form known as the meander in pursuit of an “anti-image” that eschewed all expressive content. Appropriating this historic motif transformed Knifer’s approach to art into an ascetic exercise of endless variation and reiteration in which time and evolution becomes relative, a journey he described as “without progression or regression.”
This retrospective exhibition includes paintings and drawings from 1950 to the early 2000s, examining Knifer’s strategic use of reduction and repetition as a means of achieving liberation. A mural on the largest wall in the gallery demonstrates the potential of the rigorously prescribed meander removed from the canvas or paper to become a fully integrated architectural element. In POLIPTIH 1–4 [POLYPTYCH 1–4] (1976), the meander extends across four panels, while the 13-feet-wide JK F HC 91 1 (1991) invites total immersion in its symphonic movement.
A rich selection of works on paper chronicles his meditative use of repetition, from his seminal self-portrait series (1949–1951) and a group of early 1960s sketches mapping the gradual distillation of the meander to several highly saturated graphite drawings from later decades. These drawings provide unique insight into the artist’s working process and overall conceptual concerns. His notebooks, which he referred to as his “Banal Diary,” include entries written in horizontal and vertical blocks, taking on the form of the meander and illustrating the extent to which Knifer's artistic practice was inextricably linked to his daily life.
Recent solo exhibitions of Julije Knifer’s (b. 1924, Osijek, Croatia; d. 2004, Paris, France) work have been mounted at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2024); Neue Galerie Graz, Austria (2020); Museum der Wahrnehmung, Graz, Austria (2020); MAMCO, Geneva (2018); and Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2017). He represented Croatia at the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and his work has been featured in recent group shows at Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2022–2023); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (2022–2023); Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Austria (2022); Tate Modern, London (2019); and Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2018). His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
Peter Freeman, Inc. published a leporello on the occasion of the exhibition Julije Knifer: Works from 1950 to 2004, featuring text by Lynn Zelevansky:
Julije Knifer’s Meanders
Meander (the noun): a winding path or course. Especially: Labyrinth
Meander (the verb): to wander aimlessly or casually without urgent destination
–Merriam-Webster Dictionaryᶦ
In 1960, Julije Knifer created Meander 1, a painting resembling a geometric form that went for a walk. The work depicts a black rectangle on a white background with a vertical line down its length that can read as emptiness. It is attached to a similar form that appears to be further back in space, which connects to another rectangle that promises to become a structure akin to the first two. Theoretically, this could go on forever. The artist began to create his Meanders in 1959 and made them almost exclusively until his death in 2004. Usually black-and-white, large, small, or in between, they can be paintings, drawings, or collages. Knifer arrived at the meander through experimentation. In the later 1950s, his aim was “to reduce everything to utter minimum” and in the process achieve a kind of “anti-painting.” He embraced the paradox inherent in making art that was a statement against itself. For him, the resulting absurdity was a form of freedom.ᶦᶦ
It seems likely that Knifer’s relationship to art was shaped, at least in part, by his experiences during World War ll. In 1941, the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia, and at eighteen he was drafted into the army of the newly formed Independent State of Croatia, which was controlled by fascist collaborators. Following the war, artists of all kinds across Europe and the Americas responded to the useless brutality of the war and the world that created it, so Knifer was in good company in his sympathy for the absurd. He felt a kinship to figures like Samuel Beckett, John Cage, and Franz Kafka.
Around the time that he arrived at the meander, he became a member of the Croatian artists’ group, Gorgona, which was active through 1966. Unlike many artists’ groups of the period, Gorgona didn’t endorse a particular form of art. Rather, those involved supported each other in their quest for artistic license. Their meetings could take the form of a stroll around Zagreb to observe the sunset or the beginning of Spring.ᶦᶦᶦ They were a time to converse. There were also satirical performances for the camera, including a series of photographs from 1966 taken in the galleries at Knifer’s first major solo exhibition at Zagreb’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In the images, members of Gorgona pretend to disapprove of his work, chiding him for it while he repents, hanging his head in shame. Later, they see their error and beg for his forgiveness, bowing before him. In the fancy attire of a bygone era, he accepts their apology with an outstretched arm and a hand gesture that suggests a blessing. They kiss his hand. The artist can afford to be magnanimous because the public has perceived his greatness. This burlesque implies a critique: in the art world people may reject work until it becomes fashionable, when they embrace it.
In addition to Gorgonaᶦᵛ and the meander, Knifer’s travels impacted him profoundly. In 1956, he visited the Venice Biennale where he saw works by Picasso, Gris, and Mondrian; in 1957, he made his first of several trips to Paris, where he encountered the work of François Morellet who would become his good friend. These trips proved fruitful as a few years later, in 1961, he showed at the Denise René Gallery in Paris. René was famous for her work with vanguard artists and her interest in geometric abstraction and kinetic art. At II. documenta in Kassel, West Germany in 1959, he was particularly impressed with the work of the American Abstract Expressionists, especially the radical formal reduction of Barnett Newman’s paintings. At the time, Europeans were generally working at more traditional sizes, while these American artists, influenced by the Mexican muralists of the first half of the 20th century, had proclaimed the end of easel painting. The sheer size of their works affected Knifer’s art—not only did his canvases become larger, he also extended beyond the canvas, making numerous murals. The size of these works vary, but Knifer was bold in the way he executed them. Many were outside, including a huge Meander painted on a textile and hung off a cliff. In photographs, onlookers appear tiny in comparison to the work. Even inside a gallery, a giant-sized Meander in deep black against a white wall gains enormous power.
Someone looking at one of Knifer’s paintings might assume that he was a maker of simple geometric abstractions, and in a way, he was, but the concepts behind his work are extremely important to an understanding of them. His use of a radically reduced form was not for its own sake or in thrall to mathematics. Rather, it facilitated his desire to reduce painting to the point where it hardly exists. When he found the meander he realized his goal; it led him within sight of nothingness.
The word “meander” has several meanings, but Knifer claimed not to care about his title; he said that he just liked the sound of the wordᵛ and wrote that, with these canvases, he only wanted to “list facts.” When a painting of his connects several meanders, it can seem to move across a canvas or a wall as if it is wandering aimlessly; in other words, meandering. Also, in his writings he uses the word “flow” in relation to his art, which suggests the ease of movement intrinsic to meandering. Yet, for him, the paintings “are only the final form of a subprocess, which is a part of the whole flow process called meander.”ᵛᶦ For Knifer, the paintings are evidence of his thought process and the structure that he built with it. There was a personal quotient to the work, too. He felt that the most essential aspect of his art was that it allowed him “to be completely focused, and also to enjoy full spiritual freedom,”ᵛᶦᶦ and recalled that, “after the year fifty-nine,” when he first created the meander, “everything was simple, patient and directed.”ᵛᶦᶦᶦ That was what he required.
Text: © Lynn Zelevansky
ᶦ Merriam-Webster Dictionary, s.v. “meander,” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/meander.
ᶦᶦ Julije Knifer, “Notes” in Julije Knifer: Uncompromising (Zagreb: Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti, 2017), 145.
ᶦᶦᶦ Nena Demitrijjević, “Gorgona as a Way of Existence” in Laura Hoptman and Tomáš Pospiszyl, Primary Documents: A Sourcebook For Eastern and Central European Art Since the 1950s (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 137.
ᶦᵛ Email from Zvonko Maković, August 8, 2024. In a 2001 interview with Maković, Knifer attests to the importance of Gorgona for him.
ᵛ Zvonko Maković, “Julije Knifer” in Julije Knifer: Uncompromising, 39.
ᵛᶦ Julije Knifer, “Notes,” (New York: The Serving Library, 2022), PDF, https://www.servinglibrary.org/journal/17/notes.
ᵛᶦᶦ Julije Knifer, “Notes” in Julije Knifer: Uncompromising, 145.
ᵛᶦᶦᶦ Ibid.