Untitled

Wilting flowers in a vase.

Born in 1948, Margita Mancova's creative work was predominantly inspired by the 1960s. The 1960s were an explosive decade internationally, bearing witness to proliferation of modernist ideas and trends. It was the era of Kennedy and Kruschev, and the beginning of the Cold War, which would endure for most of the second half of the twentieth century, and was characterized most symbolically by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Iron Curtain divided Eastern and Western Europe, both ideologically and literally, and student political uprisings took place globally. Psychedelia, an massive increase in consumerism, and the associated trends of marketing and advertising further epitomized the era. Minimalism developed a formal language with no external references, predicated solely on line, colour and geometric form as key components of both painting and sculpture. The key figures of Minimalism included Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Colour Field painting, as practiced by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, further developed some of the expressive philosophies of Abstract Expressionism, but reduced much of the rhetoric, instead approaching a more rule-based approach to surface and colour that associated this practice with Minimalism. Around the world a number of artistic movements echoed the artistic concerns of the previously mentioned movements, often with regional fortes and nuance. In Italy, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni established Spatialism, and in Germany the Zero group under the leadership of Gunter Uecker adopted similar ideas. The influential school of Existentialist Philosophy was an important source of creativity for artists, with artists like Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti achieving international prominence for their distinguishing approaches to the human form and the anguish related to the human condition.