Chapeau de Beuys

oil on canvas
90 × 110 cm

Probably because while I was a little girl the drawing of a snake that had swallowed an elephant, i.e. a hat, from “The Little Prince” was engraved in my memory, from time to time I also paint, draw or collage a hat or two. The most poignant among these hats is the collage “Joseph Beuys” of 2002. Art historian Tonko Maroević saw in it “a symbolic hats-off to the great exemplar of the esoteric dimensions of visual art”.

In 2019 on a red ground I painted a “depleted” white figure. It seemed to me, out of all attempts at giving it a title, that “Beuys’s Hat” was the most fitting, and with these words I covered the whole area of the hat.
Joseph Beuys, German artist, an exceptional figure in contemporary world art, is also known for having been a wartime aviator and for having survived going down with his plane a in 1943. This note connects him with the famous airman and magical writer and illustrator of one of the finest books for the young: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
Their counter-factual friendship was prompted by the imagination of the little girl A. Z.

(2024; written for the audio guide to the exhibition “NON-BAR-RIER-S” [“NE-PRE-PRE-KE”] in the Typhlological Museum in Zagreb, 2024)