Martek

Vlado Martek

Vlado Martek has a BA degree in philosophy and literature, whereby
he entered the field of visual art by writing poetry. In the mid-1970s, his poetry acquired special forms: he extracted poetry from the book and incorporated it into “poetic objects” made of mirrors, clay and books; he wrote poster poetry which he exhibited in exhibition-actions held by the neo conceptualists Group of Six Artists (1975–1979) in the streets and squares of Zagreb and other places. Martek called himself a “pre-poet”, investing great effort into the “purification” of poetry to such an extent that it was reduced to no more than an emphasis on the reality of the constitutive elements of the poem’s materiality.
Hence, the poem consists of various backgrounds used for writing, such
as pencils, erasers, letters, poetic forms… In the work from the Sonnets series(1978–79), poetic form becomes visible in its characteristic arrangement of fourteen lines divided into two quatrains and two tercets.