Avgust Černiggoj 1898 – 1985
Peter Krečič [text]
Garibaldi, IT: Antonia Jannone Designi di Architettura, 1990. Original edition. Text in Italian. Oblong quarto. Saddle stitched printed wrappers. 48 pp. 34 black and white illustrations. English fact sheet and a pair of gallery postcards laid in. A fine copy.
Augusto Černiggoj studied at the Weimar Bauhaus according to Wingler [p. 615].
9.5 x 6.75-inch softcover catalog with 48 pages and 34 black and white illustrations published to accompany an exhibition in 1990 under the auspices of the Gallery of August Černigoj in Lipica. Includes examples of his graphic works in a variety of mediums, including woodcuts, linocuts, copperplates, dry points and aquatints.
During the years 1924-1929 Avgust Černiggoj, a Slovene artist from Trieste, fashioned his special version of Constructivism, and propagated it with a typical vanguard and activist fervor first in Ljubljana (Slovenia, Yugoslavia) in 1924 and 1925, and afterwards in Trieste (Italy) from 1925 to 1929. He first encountered Modernism whilst studying in Munich from 1922 till the end of 1923, and became a supporter of Constructivism at the Weimar Bauhaus, during his stay there in 1924. The basis of his Constructivism, including its ideological and political premises, was Russian Constructivism. He came to know this movement indirectly through various publications, and through intermediaries at the Bauhaus. Some of his works dating back to 1924 show Tatlin's, Rodchenko's and El Lissitzky's influence. Even the quasi political and artistic slogans with which he correlated his exhibitions or which he proclaimed in his manifestos were taken from the Russian Constructivist terminology and proclamations. (For instance, they strongly lean towards the stand taken by the authors of the Realist manifesto.) His works ranged from three-dimensional reliefs, stage projects, photo-collages and pure photographic experiments, to the realizations of a constructivist environment (Trieste, 1927). In both towns, Trieste and Ljubljana, he founded a group of followers, which in Trieste grew to assume the proportions of a constructivist movement, and had its presentation in a special section of the artist's union exhibition in 1927. [monoskop]