Croatian – American painter, filmmaker, photographer (and much more) Anton Perich, opened his exhibition named ‘True Revolutionary’ in Dubrovnik’s Dominican Monastery.
”I am very enthusiastic about being in the most beautiful place in the world, Dubrovnik. I would love young artists to see this exhibition, to see that something very magical and beautiful can be done, with the fabric, a little bit of color, and that’s all – artist said at the opening night.
”Anton Perich is one of the few Croats who left the comfort and safety of his home in quest for art, following its mainstream path upstream, searching ‘ad fontes’ to the source of ideas. He went to Paris in the mid’1960s, where the painting was already seen as an integral visual phenomenon, when traditional painting, drawing, graphics, film and photography were just tools for the articulation of the message, when the ‘communication’ wasn’t an abused term.” , Dubrovnik art historian Marin Ivanovic said at the opening.
About the artist:
Anton Perich is an American Filmmaker, photographer and video artist, born in Dubrovnik in 1945. He has lived and worked in New York since 1970.
From 1965 to 1970, he lived in Paris and became close to Lettrist Group (lettrism), together with Isidore Isou, or Maurice Lemaître, but also with French film underground milieu – Piero Heliczer, Michel Auder, Raphaël Bassan, Slobodan Pajic, Pierre Clémenti. For that period, he changed his name and became Antoine Perich, because Anton was not familiar a name in France. He was among the first activists to present, every week, programs of avant-garde and underground films in the American Center in Paris.
He moved to New York in 1970, became friends with Andy Warhol and contributed as a photographer to Warhol’s Interview. He also worked as a busboy at the legendary Max’s Kansas City, where he photographed the scene as an ongoing art performance every night, along with exhibiting the photos on the walls.
In 1977-78, he designed and built an electric painting machine, an early predecessor of the inkjet printer. The development of this machine made Anton a pioneer of electric-digital-computer art.
In 1978, he founded NIGHT as an interactive “gallery space” for his photography and the nightly activities at places such as Studio 54. In 2006, he had a video retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, in New York, where he still lives.
