In March 1991, the collector and publisher Francesco Conz, in collaboration with the Muzej Suvremene Umjetnosti (Museum of Contemporary Art) in Zagreb (MSU), invited several artists who had been members of Gorgona, the Croatian avant-garde group active between 1959 and 1966, to take part in an artistic residency at Brunnenburg Castle in Merano, Italy. During their stay, the five artists created thirteen artworks, each accompanied by fifteen hand-made copies, all produced on sheets of the same size.
These works were intended to form part of a box set, an art edition that was initially planned to include large-scale reproductions of seven of the group's earlier works, printed on canvas in Como, as well as eight additional works obtained by combining the previous ones into a continuous strip, thereby creating a sort of “collective work”. The box was also to contain photographs documenting the residency, historical photographs and video interviews filmed at Brunnenburg. Conz died in 2010, and the box set was never completed, although all its components had been produced, with the exception of the folder intended to hold them. The artists' works have since remained in the Francesco Conz Archive.
At Brunnenburg, Knifer proposed his classic “meander” motif, a geometric structure characterized by the contrast between black and white, which he had introduced in late 1959 as a form of “anti-painting”. Nena Dimitrijević identified it as synonymous with his “artistic identity”, arguing that, inspired by the aesthetics of Primary Painting and Hard Edge, Knifer had adopted a conceptual approach to artistic practice centred on a single pictorial solution, a symbol that embodied his radical artistic will.
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