Ivo Režek, oil on canvas.

Description

Ivo Režek (Varaždin, May 22, 1898 – Zagreb, September 2, 1979) Croatian academic painter and caricaturist.

His parents are Antun and Viktorija, father from Varaždin, mother from Čakovec. He went to primary school and high school in Varaždin (his grandmother wanted her grandson to attend the Hungarian high school in Čakovec and become a railway employee), but his parents supported his desire to practice painting. In October 1915, he enrolled at the College of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb (now the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb). He studied for a year, and was mobilized in 1916 (World War I was in progress). In 1, he went to Prague, where he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts there in the class of Vlaha Bukovac. After his studies in 1918, interested in wall painting techniques, i.e. fresco painting, he went to Paris, studied fresco technique at the Sorbonne under Marcel Lenoir*. He exhibited in Paris salons. He returned to Zagreb in 1924, from 1931 to 1934 he edited Kopriva, he was politically persecuted for his sharp criticism of fascism (he drew caricatures of Hitler and Mussolini). He drew cartoons
and in Kerempuh. In the 1930s, he faced the misunderstanding of the environment for the avant-garde. After the war in 1947, he became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where he worked until his retirement in 1968.

Artistic work

He is a draftsman who describes and defines. Form preoccupies him, his paintings are extremely neat and neoclassical, he observes nature and the world through geometric shapes. His models are Cézanne and Velázquez. In the 1930s, he nurtured figuration, which takes on the characteristics of magical realism in the honest depiction of life in Zagorje. After the Second World War, he painted religious themes, creating frescoes for the church in Trsat. With the same concentration with which he used to create motifs from Zagorje, he now created landscapes and subtle atmospheres of the Mediterranean.

In his many years of painting, he tried almost all painting techniques. His favorite motifs are everyday life, landscape paintings, portraits, nudes. In addition to classical painting, as "Ives" he drew caricatures for the humorous newspapers Kopriva and Kerempuh.