There is no need to emphasise the fact that the artist’s sense of his own individuality is one of the major characterisitcs of all art, regardless of the time or place; that this sense is common to all artists; and that all artists tend to give the express it as forcefully as they can. 

Those were the early 1960’s, a short period of economic prosperity in Yugoslavia and, even more, a time of a great spiritual enthusiasm, when the Zagreb-based Gallery of Contemporary Art staged a series of exhibitions of the international art movement, New Tendencies.

One of the most peculiar phenomena in the history of Croatian and Yugoslav art has entered the historiy books  under the name of Gorgona (‘Gorgon’), this being the name in Greek mythology for a monster, whose eyes, supposedly, had the power to turn to stone anyone who dared look into her face. 

It was the novel ways of comprehending the structure and the meaning of a work of art, based on mental and post-aesthetic attributes, as well as the emergence of a broader social and spiritual atmosphere, that had conditioned the newest developments and opened up the way to a better understanding of a whole range of artistic processes. In Zagreb, the phenomena to which this general comment refers include some examples of Radical Art informel that appeared between 1956 and 1962 and all the activities of the group named Gorgona (‘Gorgon’), which was active between 1959 and 1966.