AskFredAskFredStart Analyzing

Artist Market Intelligence

Edo Murtić

1921–2005 · Croatian · Abstract Expressionism

CONFIDENTIAL MARKET
EUR 48'750Auction record
78Realized lots on file

Biography

Edo Murtić (4 May 1921, Velika Pisanica, near Bjelovar – 2 January 2005, Zagreb) stands as one of the defining figures of gestural abstraction and high modernism in Southeast Europe. He trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb under Ljubo Babić and subsequently at the school of Petar Dobrović in Belgrade, before holding his first solo exhibition in Zagreb in 1935 — a precocious debut that foreshadowed a career of extraordinary range and productivity, ultimately encompassing more than 300 solo exhibitions worldwide. During the Second World War, Murtić served as a partisan, producing a body of documentary drawings in ink, pencil, and mixed media that recorded antifascist resistance with both historical precision and artistic force, grounding his later abstract work in lived experience. A Fulbright grant brought him to New York City in the early 1950s, where encounters with leading American painters proved decisive. The cycle Experience of America, painted in 1951–1952 during his time in the United States and Canada, channelled the energy of urban life into dynamically composed canvases of strong colour and urgent gesture, marking his full transition from figuration to the abstract expressionist idiom he would develop into monumental compositions across the following decades. Solo exhibitions in Zagreb and Belgrade in 1953 — among the first individual presentations of abstract art in the socialist world — consolidated his position as a pioneer, and the painting Zadar 1953 remains emblematic of this pivotal moment. In 1958, Murtić became the first Croatian artist to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, securing his standing within broader European and transatlantic modernist discourse. His late career demonstrated undiminished ethical and political engagement: War (Rat), an ensemble of more than 350 drawings, gouaches, and collages responding to the conflicts of the 1990s, was exhibited at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb in January 2010 and prompted cultural leaders to recognise him as one of Croatia's greatest artists of the late twentieth century. Murtić's work entered collections of international significance, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Museums of the Vatican, the Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation Vienna, and institutions across Croatia, the former Yugoslavia, Italy, France, Belgium, and the United States. The Murtić Foundation, established after his death in 2005, oversees his legacy and has coordinated major retrospective projects, including the centenary retrospective Murtić 100 held at the Meštrovićev paviljon in Zagreb in 2021.

Galleries

Institutions

Exhibitions

Related artists

Theodoros Stamos

The full picture

AskFred’s paid report on Edo Murtić includes a full 6-dimension market score, comparable sales, and Fred’s complete analysis.

Get the full reportAnalyze an artworkSell with AskFred