Lackless

Mangos (born March 14, 1921 in Šid , Serbia as Dimitrije Bašičević; † December 18, 1987 in Zagreb , Croatia ) was a Croatian artist, curator and art critic. Through his work, he has had a major impact on Croatian post-war art.

Life

Mangos was born on April 21, 1921 in Šid , Serbia , into a farming family. His father was the Serbian artist Ilja Bašičević . Mangos studied art history and philosophy in Vienna (1942–44) and Zagreb (1945–49). In 1957 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the artist Sava Šumanović . He worked as a curator and assistant in the Yugoslav Academy of Arts and Sciences. He founded the Gallery for Primitive Art (now the Croatian Museum of Naïve Art ), where he also worked as a curator until 1964. From 1971, Mangelos was chairman of the Center for Film, Photography and Television. He organized numerous exhibitions in and outside Croatia and published writings on photography and art. In 1982 he retired. He died on December 18, 1987.

plant

Mangos wrote short prose and poems at school, and around 1941 he created his first artistic works. Based on notebooks, which he provided with black markings in the 1940s, which stand for friends, acquaintances and neighbors who died in the war, as if they had been crossed off a list, his work remains mostly text-based in later years. From 1959 he used the name Mangos, which goes back to the name of a small town near his birthplace.

He was a founding member of the avant-garde Gorgona Group , named after a poem Fehlos. After their dissolution he was in close contact with the Group of Six Artists from 1975 . His first exhibition took place in Belgrade in 1968. His theoretical and artistic work prompted him to use letters and words as material. In the 1950s and 1960s, his main materials were notebooks, slates and globes, which he overwritten and reinterpreted at the same time as redesigned readymades, sometimes with individual letters, words or sentences and sometimes with entire texts in Latin, Cyrillic or Glagolitic letters . Starting from the anti-art he used words to negate the irrational quality of paintings and to oppose them with something rational like letters.

In his manifestos he addresses the progress of society while art is at a standstill. It is stuck to the old, ingenious spirit, which cannot follow the rapid development of "machine civilization". In the manifesto "Shid Theory" from 1978, he divides his life into 9 1⁄2 "deficiencies" based on a "psycho-biological" theory that states that the human organism and thus also the personality renew itself every seven years . In addition to spiritual tendencies, Mangelo's work is characterized by irony, intermediality , expressionistic nihilism and his own experiment of "no-art".

Solo exhibitions (selection)

• 1981: Zagreb, Galerija PM, "Mangos no.1-9 - Retrospectives"
• 1997: Berlin, Galerie Rainer Mayor, "from c"
• 1998: New York, A / D Gallery
• 1998: London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery
• 2001: Berlin, The Drawing Room, "Les paysages des mots"
• 2003: Kassel, Kunsthalle Fridericianum , "nos. 1 - 91⁄2"
• 2011: London, Frieze Art Fair , Regent's Park
• 2014: New York, Galerie St. Etienne, "LIJA / MANGELOS: Father & Son, Inside & Out"
• 2014: Berlin, Aanant & Zoo, "Mangelos-documenta?"

literature

• Stanislav Živković: Bašičević, Dimitrije . In: General Artist Lexicon . The visual artists of all times and peoples (AKL). Volume 7, Saur, Munich a. a. 1993, ISBN 3-598-22747-7 , p. 357.

Web links

• Ilija & Mangos Foundation

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
2. ↑ Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Ljubljana ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
3. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original dated November 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ Mangos: Les lettres et les mots. Peter Freeman Inc.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ [1]