Tomislav Gotovac

Tomislav Gotovac - Superman

Técnica: 4 vintage photographs b/n

Biografía del Artista: Tomislav Gotovac (Sombor, Yugoslavia, 1937 - Zagreb, Croatia, 2010) was a prominent visual artist, photographer, performer and filmmaker active during the second half of the 20th century. He was a key member of the Croatian artistic avant-garde, being the first artist to stage a happening in the country and one of the driving forces of Yugoslav underground experimental cinema in the mid-1960s. With a worn-out confidence in politics, a radical attitude and a tenacious determination to unite art and life, his artistic expression became a vehicle for change. Gotovac’s work has transcended its own time, influencing later international visual artists, performers and filmmakers. His first works, photographic series and experimental films, date from the early 1960s and already show an exchange between the cinematic and the photographic that would characterize and consolidate his later production. In the early 1960s, he introduced social themes into his work, establishing a relationship between art and politics that resulted in works about the docility of the masses and the questioning of concepts such as social conformity. Gotovac was an activist whose tools were his body and his personality, a naked and uninhibited body and a personality marked by a tenacious perseverance in uniting art and life. He developed a contemporary and consistent language that began with the reinterpretation of historical political events and the revelation of everyday politics to give rise to creations in which he ridiculed positions of power and all those who served them. Such was the relationship he established between his own life and his artistic experience that he designated each stage of his life as if it were an artistic movement: the period between 1956 and 1967 he called "Work Action"; the period from 1967 to 1976 "Art Education Action"; the period from 1976 to 1986, "Haircut and Shaving Action" and the decade from 1986 to 1996, the most important in his production, "Paranoia View Art Action". During this last period, Gotovac developed a vision of the world in which, through the optics of paranoia, he reinterpreted political events to place them in cause and effect relationships and deconstruct manipulation.