Marijan Jevšovar was a painter and a member of the Gorgona group in Zagreb. He graduated in Painting from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 1946. Since 1939 he has been engaged in graphic design.
He was one of the members of the proto-conceptual Gorgona group (1959 – 1968). He engaged in all conceptual expressions of Gorgona’s activity within the group: art as an idea, and art as a concept. He participated in the group meetings involving the Questionnaires (1961 – 1968), and other activities of the group, such as the Adoration action (1966), Recreation Hour happening (1962), and other collective works of the group. He authored the Gorgona anti-magazine no. 3, 1962, and made several drafts that remained unrealised.
His painting consists of reducing the register to achromatic colours, thus achieving monochrome Surfaces in the spirit of Art Informel, surfaces of a contemplative character influenced by the philosophy of Zen Buddhism, existentialism and absurdity. The result is not essential, but the mental process, gesture and stroke. In Jevšovar’s words, painting is a “negation of the form and the soiling of the white surface” of the canvas or paper. In the Gorgona period, the most significant painting from his oeuvre is the Grey surface (1960 – 1962), which he painted over two years in a monotonous process of applying and scraping a layer of grey paint. From the same period is his series of Perfect Drawings (1965).
From 1971, and especially from 1976 to 1979, he expanded the colour register and moved closer to primary and analytical painting (White-Green Research, 1977; Stroke, 1978). With Josip Vaništa, he co-authored the Postgorgona (1985 – 2010) and P. S. Post scriptum (1989 – 1991) bulletins.