A core member of the Neo-Constructivists group of sculptors between 1968 and 1972 (together with Tone Lapajne, Drago Hrvacki, and Dušan Tršar), Dragica Čadež is one of the foremost Slovenian contemporary women sculptors and the first woman to be appointed an academy professor of sculpture in Slovenia. The group was brought together by their minimalist and abstract tendencies and an analytical approach to creative work. The artists followed current trends in art, in particular in contemporary British sculpture, basing their own explorations of abstraction, minimalism, and the impersonality of artistic expression on them. They frequently used monochromatic industrial paints and forms reminiscent of industrial design. Their works tend not to show any trace of the artist’s hand or gesture, appearing self-sufficient and independent of their creators.

Four-Armed Sign, a clearly readable and rationally constructed wood sculpture, dates from the Neoconstructivist period. Čadež first applied a uniform layer of dark blue paint to the geometrical object, then defined the edges of the shape with a pastel yellow and divided it centrally with diagonals. The application of industrial paint is quite uniform, without visible traces of the handling of the material, in keeping with the Neoconstructivists’ pursuit of the impersonal and the rational. Denying the work symbolic meaning and iconography, the artist created a neutral, generic body based on the exploration of geometry and the material – fiberboard. We are thus faced with an object as a pure artistic visualization of the principles of neo-constructivism.

Similar minimalist approaches are also apparent in other works by Dragica Čadež and other artists of the Neo-Constructivists group, e.g., Dušan Tršar’s SO II and Drago Hrvacki’s Composition XXII in this room, and Tone Lapajne’s Analysis of Shape included in the display Points in Time.