Josip Vaništa was born in Karlovac in 1924. Starting as a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb (he graduated in 1950), Vaništa subsequently trained to become a professor in architecture and eventually obtained tenure at the University of Zagreb. In 1994, he was made a full member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts.
A prominent figure in his local scene, one of his claims to cultural relevance was co-founding the Gorgona Group in 1959 (with the likes of Ðuro Seder and Ivan Kožarić, both of whom have contributed to the European Parliament Contemporary Art Collection). The group was a renowned collective of Yugoslav artists and intellectuals who worked together until 1966 (the group was ultimately dissolved in 1994). The group defended a forward-thinking, concept-driven aesthetic agenda, organised exhibitions and published an eponymous ‘anti-magazine’.
Vaništa’s own corpus is marked by diversity, as it comprises everything from collages, traditional landscapes and still lifes to photographs and austere abstract paintings that explore themes such as loneliness and anxiety. Abstraction cloaks the depicted objects until they are no longer recognisable.
His first exhibition was held in 1952 with Miljenko Stančić at the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. His career included over 50 monographic exhibitions in total. He also participated at the 1997 Venice Biennale with the Gorgona Group. A survey covering 70 years of Vaništa’s work, Abolition of Retrospective was mounted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2013.
Vaništa passed away in 2018.