He is one of the most important Croatian artist of the second post-war period and one of the masters of European Abstraction of the 60s and 70s.
Edo Murtic died in Zagreb on January 2, 2005.
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Born in Velika Pisanica, in 1921, Murtic lived in New York in the last years of the 40s. The contact with the American school of Pollock, Kline and DE Kooning had a great influence on his conversion to Abstractism, an artistic season which he followed until the last years of the 70s, characterising his art with a sign of great power and an aggressive use of the colours. His subsequent return to landscapes has been a very natural development, an evolution documented majestically in Michael Gibson's great monograph.
His works are present in the public collections of the world's most important museums: from the Tate Gallery in London to the museum of Modern Art in New York, from the Museè d'Art Moderne in Paris to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, from the Narodni Galerie in Prague to Kunsthaus in Zurich, not to mention the museums in Boston, Houston, Seul and Wien and in Italy Genova, Torino and Brescia. Murtic has participated in the Biennial Exhibition in Venice in 1958 and in 1964, in Documenta Kassel in 1958, in the Tokyo Biennial Exhibition in 1953 and in 1965, in the Biennial Exhibition in San Paulo in Brasil in 1967.
Anthologic exhibitions of his works have been set up at Zurich's Kunsthalle in 1965, at Milan's Palazzo Reale in 1971, at Zagreb's Museum of Arts and Crafts in 1990 and Ohio's Kennedy Museum of American Art in 1994.