Josip Vaništa was one of the most prominent Croatian artists of the second half of the 20th century. He was the founder of the Gorgona group.
He engaged in painting, illustration, book design and set design. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1950. Since 1951, he has been a professor of Drawing at the Faculty of Architecture in Zagreb. During the Gorgona period, the phenomena of light and emptiness led him from figurative to abstract expression, in which all contents disappear in a final reduction into a single line drawn along the middle of white linen of canvas or paper. In 1961, he published the first issue of the Gorgona anti-magazine, thereby starting an edition of 11 issues (1961 – 1966). Vaništa would make two more issues, no. 10 and no. 11, both in 1966.
In the mid-1980s, in the constant need to preserve the collective memory of the Gorgona group, in collaboration with Marijan Jevšovar, he started the Postgorgona (1985 – 2010), and P. S. Post scriptum (1989 – 1991) bulletins. In the 1990s, he created collages on the then-current political and social situation, akin to the works from the Gorgona period.