EUGEN FELLER

Art as Pure Presence

“The goal of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else . . . . making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive—non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective.“

– Ad Reinhardt

© Ana Malnar: Eugen Feller’s living room situated in Jurjevaska street, in the old, upper part of Zagreb. The central piece is the large glass coffee table, an imitation of Gae Aulenti’s “Tavolo con Ruote” from the 1980s.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

The month of June 2025 in Zagreb has been marked by a very special home visit to Eugen Feller (Split, 1942), one of the most long-lasting contemporary painters with over 60 years of artistic creativity, and the recipient of the Vladimir Nazor Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016. Recognizable for his paintings of relief surfaces and monochromatic structures, Feller established himself as a radical representative of Art Informel in Croatia in the 1960s, influenced by the work of Ivo Gattin (1926-1978), who was the first and most consistent representative of this artistic movement.

Feller is often mentioned as an informal member of the avant-garde art group Gorgona, active between 1959 and 1966, that was a kind of a critical forum whose members were connected through the ideas of concretism and absurdity, the paradoxical and the immaterial, having no strict agenda or written manifesto. He was introduced to the group by the art critic Radoslav Putar. Feller held his first solo exhibition of Malampias- his most famous series of eight paintings, in Studio G in Zagreb, curated by the Gorgona group in 1962.

In the periods closer to minimalism and geometric abstraction, Feller produced objects in painted wood and a series of color screen prints. Later, he approached the expression of primary abstraction (Three Yellow Lines, 1981), working since 2001 primarily on geometric compositions. His works can be found in numerous museums, galleries and private collections. In 1969, Eugen Feller moved to Italy, to Sestri Levante, a small jewel of the Ligurian Riviera, 50 kilometers from Genoa, returning to Zagreb in 2000.

In 2014 the Croatian National Television (HRT) produced the TV film “Contemporaries – Eugen Feller”, written and directed by Ana Marija Habjan, a valuable source of information for writing this article.

GRANDFATHER’S LEGACY AND GROWING UP WITH THE SMELL OF TURPENTINE

Viktor Eugen Feller’s villa in Jurjevska street Zagreb, Croatia. Innen – Dekoration magazine (Interior Decoration), 25th volume, Darmstadt, September 1914, 367-398. Source: https://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/feller_haus_zagreb1.html

“I spent my entire childhood messing around with either clay or brushes. The smell of turpentine was always there, which was a nice escape from school and everything else.“

To understand the cultural and artistic environment in which the artist grew up, it is important to look back at the figure and work of his grandfather Viktor Eugen Feller, a pharmacist who came to Zagreb from Ukraine, at the end of the 19th century. At the beginning of the last century Viktor Eugen Feller made fortune with his “Elsa Fluid” exported worldwide, a “miraculous” drink supposed to cure almost any disease. With his fortune he ordered the construction of several palaces in Zagreb, thereby contributing to the creation of a new city architecture.

It is worth mentioning Elsa Fluid Dom, the first four-story building in Zagreb, on the eastern side of the Jelačić square and the Feller’s family house in Jurjevska street, built in 1911. The impressive building of 1200 square meters had 28 rooms, 7 bathrooms and numerous toilets, staircases and corridors. The house also had a garden with 5 terraces, with telephones and fire hydrants on each and a large white wooden gazebo at the end, like the ones from American movies. It was the first building with central heating in Zagreb, designed to fully adapt to the family’s needs.

It is precisely in the villa in Jurjevska street where Eugen Feller will spend his childhood, in a dwelling that he still considers as his home, despite the fact that the property has been nationalized. Today, Feller lives in the garage belonging to the villa’s complex, which he renovated into a charming apartment. In the Feller’s family villa the self-thought artist experienced his first contacts with art, as he explains: “I spent my childhood messing around with either clay or brushes. The smell of turpentine was always there, which was a nice escape from school and everything else.”

The family home of once the richest man in Zagreb was a gathering place of the city’s intellectual and artistic elite: “As far as I can remember there have been various artists in the house. “There was the painter and sculptor Valerije Michieli, for many years the Slovenian-Croatian sculptor and ceramist Milena Lah, the painter Vilko Šeferov who was a friend of the family and sculptor who made partisan monuments called Nikola Kecanin“, explains Feller.

A defining encounter for Feller that introduced him to the world of art, was the one with Josip Zanetti, at the time an art history student, author of the revolutionary painting Minimalism for 1959, inspired by a tragic event of a political nature. The painting reduced the work of art to a bare fact, a reduced element, a simple black lane. It was considered as one of the earliest works of radical reduction and minimalism, appearing almost in the same time as those of Yves Klein and Piero Manzoni. Upon Zanetti’s request, the painting was repainted black by his niece in 2014.

Zanetti who spent the last periods of his life in Paris, making money by drawing pastels for tourists on the street was the one who introduced Feller to Ivo Gattin, the pioneer of Art Informel in former Yugoslavia, and one of the major influences in his artistic development.

THE INFLUENCE OF IVO GATTIN AND RADICAL ART INFORMEL

“Gattin was very important to me, I copied him in my own way, we worked together because we were neighbors. I enjoyed it because it was a natural state of consciousness for me. A pleasure that can be described as love.”

Ivo Gattin (Split, 1926 – Zagreb, 1978) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1953. From 1963 to 1967 he was based in Milan, where he created illustrations for encyclopedias, pastels, gouaches and prints. In 1956 he began his research in the spirit of Art Informel, familiar with the work of Alberto Burri at the 28th Venice Biennale, in 1956. From Gattin Feller adopted the experimentation with unconventional painting materials such as pigment, wax, sand, resin, wire and new procedures of creating a painting like coating, burning, piercing, scratching, and tearing.

“Gattin was very important to me, I copied him in my own way, we worked together because we were neighbors. He was always smiling and positive, in stark contrast to the impressions of his tortured paintings. I enjoyed it because it was a natural state of consciousness for me. A pleasure that can be described as love”, explains Feller. In a kind of a mentor-student relation, Feller would try to try to produce the paintings Gattin would talk about. The idea for Feller’s Yellow Surface created in 1961, today part of the National Museum of Modern Art’s collection in Zagreb came from Klein’s Blue Monochrome that Gattin was talking to him about.

Eugen Feller: *Žuta površina III* (Yellow Surface III), mixed technique/canvas, 1961. National Museum of Modern Art, source: https://nmmu.hr/2022/09/13/eugen-feller-zuta-povrsina-iii-1961/

Ivo Gattin: Violet Surface with Blue, 1960, polish, pigment, chalk, burlap. Source: https://www.avantgarde-museum.com/en/museum/collection/authors/ivo-gattin~pe4457/#overlay

We have to point out that the term “Informal Art” was first conceived in France by Michel Tapié in 1952, in his manifesto book, Un art autre (A different art), which served as the catalog for an exhibition at the Studio Paul Fachetti, organized by Tapié. This exhibition brought together artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Karel Appel, Jean Fautrier, Pierre Soulages, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Camille Bryen, Ruth Francken, and Wols.

The term can be understood literally as “art without form,” but Tapié primarily sought to emphasize the spontaneity of art, free from preconceived constraints. Informel art is also free from any semantic interpretation, it is a place where a painting is an entity on its own, where the true essence lies in the process of creation. We can conclude that informel artists let their gestures, their mediums and their subconscious feelings guide their creations, like in the case of Feller’s Malampija series from 1961.

“It is not the knowledge that is important, but the path to knowledge”, said Feller during our meeting. We can sense the meaning of his words while observing Malampija: the sense is in the materiality, in the very process of building the painting, in the very gesture linked to an unrepeatable moment in time. The basis may be mental, but completely irrelevant to be talked about.

These accumulations of silted-up plaster and pigment, soaked or thrown onto the raw support of jute and then burnt are to be contemplated in silence, as a timeless stamp of an era in which daring to break norms and conventions in art meant something. The source of the name Malampia can be found in the novel The Prisoner of Poitiers (La séquestrée de Poitiers, 1930), by the French novelist André Gide. In this novel, based on a true story, the prisoner asks to be returned to “her big dear bottom, Malampia,” a dirty, dark room with a bed full of feces and vermin, which during her 25 years of captivity became a protective nest from the outside world.

“It is not the knowledge that is important, but the path to knowledge.”

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU SEE

“A painting has to be based on some logic, there must be a minimum of some thought.”

© Ana Malnar: Eugen Feller, on the right: Untitled, 2023, mixed technique on canvas, 100 x 60 cm, on the left: Untitled, 2023, mixed technique on canvas, 100 x 70 cm. Courtesy of Gallery Kaptol, Zagreb

I wish to start this last chapter of this review of Eugen Feller’s work with a well-known sentence by the minimalist artist Frank Serra, in order to further explain his minimalist path, which places him alongside world artists of this direction. Completely in tune with this extreme form of abstract art that developed in the US in the 1960s, Feller’s paintings of refined harmony, simplicity and recognizable geometric shapes contain no underlying meanings or profound understandings, like some other forms of abstract art do. There is always a form of repetition of a certain geometry in Feller’s work, that allows greater expressiveness. Instead of using color to convey a personal expression, it is used to convey the impact of the painting as it is.

There are three principal minimalist artists that in my opinion resonate with Feller’s artistic philosophy. The first would be Ad Reinhardt, one of the most relentless defenders of the purity of abstraction, famous for his phrase “Art is art. Everything else is everything else. Reinhard argued that the only standard in art is uniqueness and excellence, straightforwardness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The only thing to be said about art is that it is breathless, lifeless, deathless, contentless, formless, spaceless, and timeless. The following Feller’s Untitled painting from 2023 evokes by color and composition Reinhard’s Abstract painting. Red, from 1952.

The second would be Kazimir Malevich, a Russian painter, well known for his suprematist artistic vision dominated by pure, geometric shapes and limited palettes. Lastly I would name the German painter Josef Albers, solely because of his Homage to the Square series and research of color. This aim to create a pure and uncluttered visual experience encourages the viewer to engage with the work on a more mentally engaging level, thus why minimalist art is also considered to be intellectual, both on the side of the artist and the receiver.

For Feller, the importance of self-cultivation is a predisposition to artistic creation. He also points out that “A painting has to be based on some logic, there must be a minimum of some thought.” The art of Eugen Feller is cleared from all the layers artists commonly use to tell a story or convey an idea. He stays faithful to the minimalistic paradigma of less being more.

Sources and References:

Julije Knifer: Gorgona, publisher Josip Vaništa, 1961

The ARTnews Guide to Minimalism, Howard Halle, June 26, 2023, https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/artists/what-is-minimalism-1234666038/american-abstract-artists/

Galerija Kaptol, Eugen Feller, 09/11/2024- 25/11/2024, exhibition catalogue

National Museum of Modern Art, Eugen Feller, text Željko Marciuš, translation Ana Janković, https://nmmu.hr/en/2022/07/21/eugen-feller-malampia-1961/

5 faits à savoir sur l’Art Informel, by Camille Coquet, 27/07/2023, Magazine Barnebys, https://www.barnebys.fr/blog/5-faits-a-savoir-sur-lart-informel

Ješa Denegri, Radical Art Informel In Zagreb, 04. July 2018, Museum of Avant-Garde, https://www.avantgarde-museum.com/en/jesa-denegri-radical-art-informel-in-zagreb-english~no6576/

Suvremenici-Eugen Feller, Hrvatska radiotelevizija, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pruCNOEaT5w&t=747s

JEDNO DJELO: Josip Zanetti – Minimalizam za 1959., Hrvatska radiotelevizija, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZgRhT05fs

Priča o Eugenu Viktoru Felleru, Zagreb Memento, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BJKRqVGKKU

EUGEN FELLER

Art as Pure Presence

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Art as Pure Presence

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