Tomislav Gotovac

Tomislav Gotovac - UNTITLED (IBAR)

Technique: Collage. Cigarette packages, paper bags, cardboard, waxed cardboard.

Artist Biography: Tomislav Gotovac (Sombor, Yugoslavia, 1937 - Zagreb, Croatia, 2010) was an outstanding visual artist, photographer, performer and filmmaker active during the second half of the 20th century. He was a key member of the Croatian artistic avant-garde, being the first artist to hold a happening in the country and one of the driving forces behind the Yugoslavian experimental underground cinema of the mid-1960s. With a worn-out confidence in politics, a radical attitude and a tenacious drive to unite art and life, his artistic expression became a vehicle for change. Gotovac's work has transcended his own time, influencing later international visual artists, performers and filmmakers.His earliest works, photographic series and experimental films, date from the early 1960s and already in them there is evidence of an interchange between the cinematic and the photographic that would characterize and consolidate in his later output. In the early 1960s, he introduced the social Theme in his work, establishing a relationship between art and politics that resulted in works about the docility of the masses and the questioning of concepts such as social conformity. Gotovac was an activist whose tools were his body and his personality, a naked and uninhibited body and a personality marked by a tenacious perseverance in uniting art and life. He developed a contemporary and consistent language that started from the reinterpretation of historical political facts and the revelation of everyday politics to give rise to creations in which he ridiculed the positions of power and all those who served them. Such was the relationship he established between his own life and his artistic experience that he designated each stage of his life as if it were an artistic movement: he called the stage between 1956 and 1967 "Work Action"; the one from 1967 to 1976 "Art Education Action"; the one between 1976 and 1986 "Haircutting and Shaving Action"; and the decade from 1986 to 1996, the most important in his production, "Paranoia View Art Action". In this last period, Gotovac developed a vision of the world in which through the lens of paranoia he reinterpreted political events to place them in cause and effect relationships and deconstruct manipulation.