Josip Vaništa, Landscape. Oil on canvas.

Description

Josip Vaništa was born in Karlovac in 1924. He attended the real gymnasium in Rakovac (a suburb of Karlovac) and graduated in 1943. After two years, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He graduated from the teaching department in 1948, and in 1950 he completed the so-called special painting school with Marino Tartaglia. The following year, he started working as a professor at the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, which he held until 1994.[1]

He had his first exhibition in 1952 with Miljenko Stančić, in Zagreb, at the Museum of Arts and Crafts. Then Miroslav Krleža, director of the Yugoslav Lexicographic Institute and a writer (and Vaništa was his passionate reader), hired him to cooperate with the Institute. He asked Vaništa to make five of his portraits, and he was the last painter for whom Krleža posed.

At the beginning of the 1960s, the idea of ​​Gorgona appeared, an artistic group of which Vaništa was a co-founder. This group advocated for alternative forms of activity, organized exhibitions and published a magazine of the same name announcing conceptualism and giving up on the materialization of works of art. The Gorgon community broke up in 1994.

Vaništa exhibited independently in Zagreb, Karlovac, Opatija, Rijeka, Osijek, Paris and elsewhere, and today he is considered one of the most prominent Croatian artists. He has been a regular member of HAZU since 1994