Imaginary Animals (Urmuz)
1976
Dada
Oil on canvas
Janco-Dada Museum, Ein Hod, Israel

In the 1960s and 1970s, Janco created a cycle of work known as Imaginary Animals. Creatures depicted from his imagination in a naturalistic style with imagined abstract shapes and fantastic colours. In Urmuz Janco creates an illusion of an animal paradise from abstract invented shapes seemingly flying through the sky, digging in the dirt, and parading through their natural world.

Marcel Janco
Dada, Expressionism, Constructivism
Born: 24 May 1895, Bucharest, Romania
Nationality: Romanian-Israeli
Died: 21 April 1984, Ein Hod, Israel

Janco was a visual artist, art theorist, and architect. A co-inventor of Dadaism, he was also a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s he coedited the Romanian art magazine Simbolul, and was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Expressionism, and Futurism before his painting and stage design led him to Dadaism. He departed company with Dadaism in 1919 and, with the artist Hans Arp, founded Das Neue Leben, a Constructivist circle