Croatian painter, born on 4 May 1921 in Velika Pisanica, near Bjelovar, died on 2 January 2005 in Zagreb.
Life
Having moved to Zagreb with his family as a child, Edo Murtić attended the school of arts and crafts from 1935 to 1939 and held his first exhibition as early as 1935. In 1939 he entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, under Ljubo Babić and Krsto Hegedušić, and in 1940 studied under Petar Dobrović in Belgrade.
Active in the anti-fascist movement, he joined the liberation forces in the spring of 1944, designing posters and books for them; at that time he illustrated Ivan Goran Kovačić’s poem Jama with lithographs. In 1951 a stay in the United States and Canada introduced him to Abstract Expressionism. His 1953 exhibitions in Zagreb and Belgrade were among the first in the socialist world to show abstract painting.
A co-founder of the Zagreb group Mart in 1956, in 1958 he took part in the Venice Biennale, the Carnegie Prize in Pittsburgh and documenta in Kassel. A member of the Yugoslav (now Croatian) Academy of Sciences and Arts, he divided his life between Zagreb and Vrsar, in Istria, with his wife, the artist Goranka Vrus Murtić. He donated more than 1,500 works to the City of Zagreb.
The work
At first figurative, his painting evolved towards a personal abstraction nourished by his travels in France, Italy and the United States: expressive gesture, lyrical charge, intense colour. In the early 1960s Tachist and Informel accents appeared, with his dark masses sliding over light grounds. Then came the cycles Les Yeux de la peur (1981-1984), Feux (1985-1990), born of a voyage in the southern Adriatic, and Montraker (1992-1995), inspired by a Roman quarry near Vrsar.
Murtić also designed theatre sets, murals, mosaics (Zagrepčanka building, 1975), tapestries (Vatroslav Lisinski Concert Hall), enamels, sculptures and ceramics.
Exhibitions and collections
- Venice Biennale and documenta, Kassel, 1958
- Retrospective, Moderna galerija, Zagreb, 2003
- “Kroatische Malerei des 20. Jahrhunderts”, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, 2004
- “Murtić 100”, Meštrović Pavilion (HDLU), Zagreb, 25 May to 18 July 2021
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (Murtić donation)