In 1956, he was in Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art; in 1957 in the Milan Permanente Palace at the exhibition of “Contemporary Yugoslav Art”; in 1958 at the 29th Venice Biennale; at the same year present in the Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh, and at Documenta in Kassel; in 1959 at the Milanese Bergamini Gallery; in 1960 in the Medusa Gallery in Rome. Murtić’s visits to the Italian art scene in the second half of the fifties and the early sixties are extremely numerous, and it was a presence that was crowned by the Lissone Prize, awarded him in 1963 at the 13th edition. A crowded and in no sense secondary set of visits: particularly because it was marked by an expressive distinctiveness and a special language that has its own position within the various horizons brought together under the umbrella concept of Art Informel.
In such surroundings, Murtić embodies a certain departure, one that is special for at least two reasons. The first lies in his penchant for lyrical naturalism, which, nourished by his being rooted in a powerful landscape tradition, gives an example of what Testori indicates as the “naturalism of participation”: an original intuition of the visual body as organism, some kind of deep Mediterranean instinct for penser couleur, the boldness of the graphic stroke that at once becomes the emotionally excited warp of the painting – all these are characteristics that the Italian context in particular values so highly. The second reason refers to the very early cosmopolitan profile of a language of this nature. Formed in the culture from which he at once drew a certain identity as well as the nature of the lively Central European melting pot, the Croatian artist was nevertheless among the very few who from the early fifties on “rinsed his washing” (in other words, refined his language) equally in the Hudson River and in the Seine.
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Flaminio Gualdoni
Art historian and art critic