Portrait of Oton Gliha

Vojin Bakić (1915 – 1992) produced a series of public monuments in the post-war period.
Unlike most public post-war monuments, characterised by emotional gestures and heavy with rhetoric, Bakić’s show his interest in testing out the value of volume and surface, drawing on the experience of great sculptors, such as Auguste Rodin. In examining new approaches, he liberated himself from narrative details, and the volumes and surfaces were firmed in simplified and succinct forms.
A crucial year in Bakić’s work was 1958, when his cycle of Leafing Forms was created, sculptures in which solid masses were cut out and that included empty space. Spatial experiments are also characteristic of his series Luminous Forms (1963), where the surfaces are reduced to a circular form, which receives and transmits the spatial and luminous realities that surround the work.