Ivan Picelj

Who was Ivan Picelj?

Ivan Picelj was a contemporary Croatian painter, sculptor and graphic designer.

Picelj developed a specific variation of geometric abstraction in Croatian painting by using primary colours and by reducing the shapes to geometric elements. He made sculptures and reliefs in wood and in metal. The multiplication of the basic plastic unit within a regular grid is one of his trademark procedures.

He was one of the founders and members of the group Exat 51 which, in the period 1950–1956, consited of the architects Vjenceslav Richter, Bernardo Bernardi, Zdravko Bregovac, Božidar Rašica and Vladimir Zaharović, and the painters Vlado Kristl and Aleksandar Srnec. He was also a member of the Industrial Design Studio – SIO. He is one the founders of the New Tendencies movement, and he participated in the production and exhibited at the New Tendencies exhibitions in Zagreb. He spent a lot of time in Paris where he collaborated with the Denise René Gallery. He also involved himself in graphic design from the mid-1960s and published four graphic maps: 8 seriographies, Oeuvre programmeé, Cyclophoria and Géométrie élémentaire. He organized the first industrial design exhibition in Zagreb in 1955 and helped design the Yugoslavian pavilions for national and international exhibitions.