oil on canvas, 57 x 140 cm, signed lower right, in black, "GLIHA"

The horizontal composition by Oton Gliha (1914 - 1999) represents a motive that he successfully varied throughout his life, stone heaps, namely dry walls. Here, they have the characteristics of Pollock-style, all-over painting, so a composition without a clear center, a section from a landscape that turns into abstraction with dense strokes. Gliha is fascinating in that he managed to express a motif from a landscape so that it constantly balances between the recognizability of a raised view of the grid of dry walls and pure abstraction, in other words, an expression through elements of the visual form that creates a pronounced rhythm and gives the impression of movement, trembling in his paintings. All this here is achieved in a narrowed color range, combining strokes of black, white and gray, with just a hint of yellow tones. Such mastering of a painting's space shows how Gliha, thanks to his painting skills, could create diverse and rich compositions that are teeming with life out of a single, somewhat monotonous, motif. Gliha's stone heaps are a demonstration of the enduring power of painting in the post-war modernist period when traditional painting setups (about color, rhythm, composition) were put in the service of a new, abstract (abstracting if you want) visual expression, which is not entirely separate from reality and its experience. FG

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