This year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of birth of Dimitrije Bašičević, art historian, critic and curator, who lived and worked in Zagreb under his artistic name Mangelos. Mangelos became engaged in a very personal form of art called noart; from small patches of ink in his school excercise book, which marked deaths of people he knew during World War II, he developed monochrome surfaces, paysages of war and death. But these black surfaces also formed an empty space, a tabula rasa, which offered the opportunity to develop a new, strongly and rationally based line of thought. Later Mangelos began to use school globes as well, which he painted and used as »empty boards«. On such surfaces, he wrote numerous manifestos which reveal his broad interest in traditional and contemporary thought.
Gradually, his manifestos became shorter, condensed, pithy, »super-Wittgesteinian«, as he called them. Still, there is an obvious paradox in his work, in the complex, contradictory, and poetic nature of his multi-layered art - while he demanded a functional approach, his own work remained basically manual, and its apprearance archaic.
The Moderna galerija's Arteast 2000+ collection keeps two of Mangelos's later works, Manifest vlaškovuličanski and Manifest about energy no 000, both from 1977-78.
