(...)
Fifty years on, seen with hindsight, his path looks like a royal road towards (his) Truth. As usual, dogma has been given the lie by life; what has subsisted, despite all the nay-saying, must have been powerful, full of vitality. It was with these attributes that Edo Murtić went from the mid- 1950s into his next period – the sixties, seventies, and on towards our own present time. His impulsiveness, his ecstatic feeling for matter and material and colour and his almost erotic feeling for canvas have made him an offender against borders. These constitutive elements have made him able to be concrete and abstract at a single moment, capable of leaping across imaginary lines of division put up here and there. For some, his sins might be labelled Montraker or One Morning, for others Art Informel or Painting of the Sign. Without needing to make reference to Sedlmayr, we shall say that Murtić's painterly power, as we can make it out today, was in the resolute occupation of a boundary position. This gave him a wider space of inspiration, let him hold in the one hand the great Concrete of Nature and in the other the great Abstract of the World.
Igor Zidić
Director of the Gallery of Modern Art, Zagreb