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curator: Igor Zidić

With good reason, Gattin, in the circle of Croatian avant-garde art is paid particular respect for his vehemence, the directness of his idiom, his innovative work with various non-painting materials. (...) In brief: Gattin was, incontrovertibly, our first Informel artist, more radical than all of them in his endeavour to distance the painting-object from traditional criteria and conventions in the direction of the self-standing object-being, which, in a higher stage of elaboration, was associated with nothing, represented nothing, remembered nothing, translated nothing, foresaw nothing and finally meant nothing – hanging on to the burdens of neither past nor future – but simply is, like a stone in a landscape.

In addition, it is impossible, if in anyone, then certainly in Gattin – to ignore at least two basic innovations that we shall always associate with his work. He shifted the emphasis from work (effect) onto working process (performance). He was also the first in this country to anticipate understanding of the fractal organisation of the world, and from time to time abandoned the security in orientation and composition afforded by the perpendicular format of the painting – the square, the rectangle, the tondo – just as after 1961 he returned to them. (...) Painting became wrestling, bricklaying, peening, hammering, raking, scraping. Instead of standard i.e. industrial paints adjusted to traditional consumers or purchasers, Gattin used various kinds of lacquers, stearin wax, cement, sand, various glues, collaging buckles, photographs, playing cards, buttons, feathers, ripped out pages of books; he added sealing wax, pigments, resins, sheet metal and wire. – from Igor Zidić's text