Julije Knifer

Edition: French

This book is the first work devoted to Julije Knifer, an artist of Croatian origin born in 1924. While his work has been receiving increasing attention for some time now, Arnauld Pierre's text traces its entire development and clarifies the issues it raises. For Knifer's art is not what it appears to be: a simple extension of the abstract and geometric trends of the interwar period. From his favorite form, the meander, and its obsessive repetition, Knifer has created a silent, indifferent, and monotonous art form that borders on the absurd, and consequently, an entire conception of existence.

An entire existence devoted to the attempt to give a spatial and visual dimension to time, to draw its intuitive topology. Time of perception and time of creation, magnified above all in the development of his graphic work, the everyday and autobiographical time of the Self-Portraits and the “banal journal” that the artist has been meticulously keeping for decades. All the components of Knifer's art affirm a conscious mode of existence in time, an intentional and freely chosen way of inhabiting duration.