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Mangelos (born April 21st 1921 in Šid, Serbia as Dimitrije Bašičević, died December 18th 1987 in Zagreb, Croatia) was a Croatian artist, curator and art critic. His work and research contributed greatly to the development of post-war art in Croatia.

Life and Work
Dimitrije Bašičević, later to assume the pseudonym Mangelos in his artistic practice, was born into a farming family in Šid, Serbia on the 21st of April, 1921. His father was the Serbian artist, Ilja Bašičević, known as a practitioner of Naive Art or Outsider Art. Bašičević studied art history and philosophy in Vienna (1942-44) and Zagreb (1945-49). In 1957 he completed a PhD on the topic of the of the work of artist Sava Šumanović. He worked for a time as a curator and assistant in the Yugoslavian academy of art and science. In 1952, he founded the Peasant Art Gallery, which he would develop into the Gallery of Primitive Art and act as curator for until 1964. This insitution endures today as the Croatian Museum of Naive Art. In 1971, Bašičević became the chairman of the Center for Film Photography and Television, part of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. He organized numerous exhibitions both within and outside of Croatia which contributed to the growth of abstract art in eastern Europe. His writings on photography and art were frequently published. In 1982, he went into retirement and died on the 18th of December, 1987.

As early as primary school Mangelos authored short prose pieces and poems, and began producing his first artistic works in 1941. Early text-based work in the form of notebooks created in the 1940s, in which the artist scawled black marks to represent friends and neighbors killed in war, as if they had been stricken from a list, foretells an interest in written language that would persist through Mangelos’ career. He adopted the pseudonym Mangelos is 1959; it derives from the name of a small city near where he was born. He was a founding member of the avant-garde Gorgona Group which are named after a correspondent poem of Mangelos. After the loosely organized group split, he became involved in the Group of Six Artists. Mangelos kept his artistic practice private, releasing works sometimes through the group-authorship of Gorgona or not at all. His first exhibition took place in 1968 in Belgrade, motivated as he was by the new generation of conceptual artists and critics. His theoretical and artistic practice engaged with the use of language, letters and texts. Originating from a desire to create Anti-Art, he used words and letter-forms as elements in paintings, in an attempt to negate the irrationality of the act of painting through the rational act of writing. Conversely, his painted text-works, which often combined languages and ripped letters or words from their life-giving context, negated the rationality of writing through the conversion of text to pure shape and form.

negating a picture creating it from words, negating a word by painting it to make its meaning different from the one when it was written; I was convinced that the meaning of the word or the painting elapses…

- Mangelos

Is his manifestos he discussed the possibility of progress within society during a simultaneous standstill in art. He argues that the ancient, while ingenious, mind cannot follow the rapid development of the 'Machine Civilization'. In his 1978 manifesto, 'Shid Theory' he develops the 'psycho-biological' hypothesis that as the human organism, and therefore also the personality, renews itself every seven years, his life can be subdivided into the existance of 9 1/2 Mangelos'. In addition to spiritual tendencies, Mangelos' work is characterized by irony, intermediality, expressionistic nihilism and his unique experiment of „No-Art“.

Solo Exhibitions
1981: Zagreb, Galerija PM, "Mangelos no.1-9 - Retrospektiva" 1997: Berlin, Galerie Rainer Bürgermeister, "a b c" 1998: New York, A/D Gallery 1998: London, Anthony d‘Offay Gallery 2001: Berlin, The Drawing Room, "Les paysages des mots" 2003: Kassel, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, "nos. 1 – 91⁄2" 2011: London, Frieze Art Fair, Regent's Park 2014: New York, Galerie St. Etienne, "LIJA/MANGELOS: Father & Son, Inside & Out" 2014: Berlin, Aanant & Zoo, "Mangelos-documenta?"

Group Exhibitions
1959-1966: Zagreb, Kroatien; Performances als Mitglied der Gorgona Group 2008: Berlin, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Transmediale 08, "Conspire" 2010: Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, "Les Promesses du passé" 2011: New York, MoMA, "I Am Still Alive: Politics and Everyday Life in Contemporary Drawing" 2012: Wien, Belvedere, "Gold" 2013: Estonia, Kumu Art Museum, Art Museum of Estonia, "Critique and Crises. Art in Europe Since 1945"