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The artist burst into the new millennium not only with unremitting vigour but actually with an exhibition practice that was practically frenetic. One after another came outstandingly prestigious individual selections and just created collections, shown from Paris to Moscow, from Ibiza to Vienna, from Ljubljana to Lissone. On almost all of these occasions Murtić showed his topicality and his vitality, rested less upon his laurels and showed off earlier works than gave dynamic proof of this hunger and thirst for painting and – paradoxically – the energy to be able to sate our need for visual sensations. Illness never prevented him from accomplishing the plans he had sketched out, and it is hard to say whether it affected his imagination at all, for it was the more powerfully motivated by positive conditions of effect and a true voluntarism of action.
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The most recent paintings, the cycle of works created in 2003 and 2004, bear the marks of yet another (alas, the ultimate) synthesis of the master. The large formats in and of themselves speak of the painter’s awareness (self-awareness) that he has at his command deep deposits of knowledge and experience, that he was able to achieve the desired memento at a monumental level. It is quite symptomatic that he called several of the recent pictures Cathedral, not so much to indicate some transcendence or metaphysics (although he had had a go at the religious genre) as to emphasise the constructional ground for his thinking-through of space, or perhaps of his experience of the aesthetic order of the elements.
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I think I am not just being led by the necessary respect, piety even, when I say that in these new works Edo Murtić has more than confirmed his high reputation and essential place in the history of modern Croatian painting. He has, what is more, expanded the already stretched borders of his expression and his oeuvre, attaining in some of the paintings a supreme composure and the real measure of his antithetical and disparate virtues. If the occasional inspiration has led him to some slightly too comfortable approaches, in most of his most recent pictures he has set up the happiest relationship between clarity of sign and free flow of the calligraphy, creating a true synthesis of forms and planes, an organic fullness of the composition. Until the very last breath, he worked as a painter, and his bequest is the best testimony to an amazing and insatiable creative vivacity.
Tonko Maroević
Poet, essayist, translator, art and literary critic