Boris Demur was an artist creating in the media of painting, conceptual art, installation and video. He was a founding member of the Group of Six Authors from Zagreb, Croatia. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb.
Boris Demur’s artistic work shows disciplined and rational decision-making on painterly procedures and their execution. The titles of his works are tasks for executing a painting as such. Demur’s many notes, pages or entire notebooks hold his records on his complete focus on his process. In his primary paintings, Demur wishes to examine the very nature of painting. The paintings are identical in size, made from the same material. He uses only one colour, one brush type, one surface – without a symbolic or aesthetic level. The painting is not the final product. Textual works, with clarified content, show how the semantics of the concept used is identified with the working process’s fundamental characteristics. Works such as I Repeat, Process or Covered are self-manifestations and self-presentations of the literal in the painting medium. The written words are not associations, but they are equal with their meaning. Demur’s sculpture connects to his painting – it carries the same primary, process, and analytic qualities. What arises is a sculpture in the medium of photography. The photograph takes on sculpture’s physical, material, process, and problematic qualities – photography becomes sculpture. In 1983, Demur discovered the motif of the spiral, which he dealt with exclusively from that time.
Boris Demur is one of the founders of the Group of Six Authors (Boris Demur, Željko Jerman, Vlado Martek, Mladen Stilinović, Sven Stilinović, Fedor Vučemilović) that was active in Zagreb from 1975 to 1981. Group’s members showed their diverse conceptual practices through exhibitions-actions. Exhibitions–actions are installations of artworks, process realizations and performances carried out by the group members from 1975 to 1979.