Ivo Gattin was an artist who created works primarily in the manner of Art Informel. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb. He lived in Milan from 1963 to 1967.
In the second half of 1956, Gattin made three paintings using oil, sanding varnish, wax, and pigment; during 1957, he did eight more in a similar proceeding. He was already aware that the path to a new conception of the image, more precisely the anti-image, in the spirit of radical Art informel, necessarily and inevitably leads him to a significant change in means and methods of work. Abandoning the traditional understanding of painting, he published the article New Materials in which he emphasized artistic freedom in the choice of materials and the influence of materials on the creative act.
It should be noted that Gattin reached such views long before Art informel became widespread on the domestic art scene, even before the international diffusion of Art informel after the 1958 Venice Biennale. In the uncertain direction of the complete (anti)painting, he implemented the rejection of the standard rectangular format (in The Red Surface with Four Holes, 1961 and other similar paintings). They were created by burning a pile of non-pictorial material on hard ground. The process was stopped in an instant, just before the flame swallowed and turned to ash the material used from which nothing but a lump of previously glow remains. The work was then cooled and created hardened magma-like surfaces.
Gattin as well created drawings, pastel, guaches, and then works on plexiglass on which he applied white paint. In 1977 he executed several large black surfaces (A Surface Struck with a Clapper, Neatly Struck Surface), and in 1978 a series of stones (Grey Stone Smoothly Ridged with a Hammer Point, Stone Vertically Ridged with a Nail.
