Baičević was an art historian, writer, curator, and proponent of outsider art in Croatia. He also produced drawings, notebooks, paintings,and over-painted globes under the pseudonym Mangelos (after a small town near his birthplace),which he kept private until his first exhibition in 1968. As a founding member of the artists' group Gorgona, Mangelos had an interest in creating "anti-art." In his work he interrogated accepted systems of thought, including language, mathematics, philosophy, aesthetics, and religion, often incorporating the tools of the young student. He covered notebooks, book pages, school blackboards, and globes with monochrome paint and letters and words in Latin, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic (an ancient Slavic alphabet) to, as he put it, write a painting or paint literature.
Gallery label from Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, September 5, 2015–January 3, 2016.
